Maintaining personal archives at home is easy and extremely important. Your experiences as a choreographer, dancer, the choreographers you work with, the people you dance with, performances, tours, costumes, music, injuries and introspective thoughts all contribute to Canada's cultural history. Items that paint a picture of your career include choreographic and rehearsal notes, journals, photographs, playbills, posters, correspondence, grant applications, budgets, business accounts, costume and set designs, press releases and clippings, curriculum vitae, original music scores, film and video.
Don't feel you need to be a master of organization to maintain your own archives; you just need to follow a few simple rules.
Newsprint becomes brittle eventually so photocopy clippings. This way you'll have an extra copy that can be handled repeatedly.
Photographs require title of work, name(s) of performer(s), date, credit of the photographer and return address. For archival purposes, it is better to write this information with a permanent marker directly on the back of the photograph, rather than using labels. Labels will eventually lose their adhesiveness and peel off.
Date all documents such as playbills, posters, press clippings and correspondence. If your correspondence is through e-mail, then print these out or copy them to disk.
Store your archives in file folders instead of scrapbooks or vinyl albums. Vinyl, adhesives (tape, glue and labels), metal (staples, paper clips), elastic bands and highlighter pens will ruin your archives over time and must be avoided. Most importantly, keep everything in a dry place; the moisture of basements produces moulds that will destroy your history.
Article originally contributed by Amy Bowring
LINKS:
Video Preservation
http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/bytopic/video/
The Care and Preservation of Photographic Prints
www.hfmgv.org/explore/artifacts/photo.asp
Preserving Newspaper
http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/services/conservation/guides/newspaper_storage.html
RESOURCES:
Canadian Dance History Society
E-Mail: mripley@interlog.com
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