This is one that started as a hobby, for me. All through the 90s and 00s, I was moving through the Vancouver queer world, having fun, getting involved, and incidentally taking pictures of all the folks around me, and keeping all the wee bits of paper, flyers, posters and ticket stubs that came into my possession. A few years ago I looked at a stack of filing boxes higher than Godzilla’s buttocks, and thought “Oh, this could be a wonderful archive.”
In my spare time in the last 13 years of small business ownership (This is a wee in-joke, as I have not had any spare time), I’ve run about 4000 documents and images through my scanners, have still more to go, and am renaming and categorizing as I go. It’s a work in progress.
Anyhoo. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of the archiving skills I can put to use:
Scanning Documents and Photos to digital form
Photographic Documentation (lightbox / booth)
Photoshop (minor edits, non-professional, non-AI)
Build an archive-holding website
Backups & building a backup system.