Record Triage and Audit

Your cardboard box is not a preservation plan.

Consider this your "Records Audit in a Box." It is a working archivist's guide to finding, assessing, prioritizing, and protecting the papers, photographs, and records already sitting in your home, closet, or organization, before you spend a dollar on supplies or panic about where to start.

Most damage to family and community records isn't due to a single dramatic event. It's years of the wrong box, the wrong closet, and nobody looking closely enough to catch it early. This workbook is the exact process I use walking into a new collection, scaled down for a closet, a filing cabinet, a church basement, or a storage unit instead of a repository.

What's inside:

A room-by-room walkthrough to find every box, closet, and forgotten location, including the ones people always miss

A material-by-material Red Flags Checklist for telling real damage from normal aging (paper, photographs, bound volumes, textiles, and more)

A triage system for deciding what to save first when you can't save everything at once, based on irreplaceability and active risk, not just sentimental value

The one distinction that actually matters when buying storage materials (buffered vs. unbuffered), so you stop guessing at "archival" marketing claims

Low-cost fixes you can do today, in under 10 minutes, that meaningfully slow deterioration

A clear guide to when it's worth calling a professional, and how to find one you can actually trust

Photocopy-ready log pages for documenting every room, box, and item as you go.

Who this is for:

Anyone holding boxes of family papers or photographs, and small organizations, churches, historical societies, fraternal orders, and community groups managing records with no formal archive and no dedicated staff.

Format: Instant digital download, 22-page printable PDF. Print the log pages as many times as you need, or fill them in digitally.

Written by Mary Snyder, an archivist and public historian with over a decade of experience, including work at Whitney Plantation, The Henry Ford, and Harvard's Legacy of Slavery initiative. This isn't theory, it's the same triage process used on real collections, adapted for yours.

Please note: This is a digital product. No physical item will be shipped. Due to the nature of digital downloads, all sales are final.