Out of the archives

Our archival outreach efforts include “Out of the Archives,” a regular column in Railroad Heritage that brings to light the world of professional archiving, providing a regular forum to share selections from our collections and tips for maintaining your own photographs. Whether you are a photographer, collector, or avid fan, it is important to organize and preserve the materials you create or collect. In this digital version of the column, we will be delivering every installment to further promote the significance and standards of the archiving world. Please let us know if there are any topics you would like us to cover in the future.

Members and supporters of the Center receive a new issue of Railroad Heritage each quarter.

Archival Principles

Here at the Center we adhere to established archival principles to ensure safety and accuracy. Our work as archivists includes:

  • Preservation. One of the Center’s main objectives is properly preserving our collections. This includes appropriately caring for and handling our materials by using archival-safe supplies, and providing a controlled environment where our collections are housed.
  • Processing. Processing materials is a long, tedious, and detailed endeavor. Organizing a collection appropriately sets up the rest of the processing work that includes any digitization and metadata entry. This work is essential to the long-term care and future accessibility of a collection.
  • Arrangement and Description. To maintain quick and easy retrieval of our materials, we organize every collection down to its individual items, if possible, given the time and resources available to us.
  • Accessibility. Finally, the Center will make sure that users have access to our processed collections. We create detailed finding aids to describe each collection and its contents and share images electronically through our websites and many social media outlets.

Additional resources

Past articles

  1. Processing updates
  2. Field notes from SoCal
  3. Rotten pixels
  4. Railcar studios
  5. Policy revisions
  6. Image requests
  7. And into the underground
  8. A pause to manage growth
  9. Henry Posner III gallery
  10. Print Acquisition Program
  11. Odyssey tips and tricks
  12. A moving-image film primer
  13. An interview with Adrienne Evans
  14. Every month is archives month
  15. Steinheimer week in Sacramento
  16. The Force is strong with this one
  17. What we do in the shadows
  18. Evolving digitization criteria
  19. Updates and gallery: fall color edition
  20. How to house your photographs like an archivist
  21. An introduction to cyanotypes
  22. New research and usage policies
  23. Glass plate negatives: part 2
  24. Glass plate negatives: part 1
  25. Building up our capacity
  26. New archives space
  27. Gallery from recent acquisitions and processing
  28. New trends, connections, and experiences at MAC 2019
  29. Collaborating with many archives on After Promontory
  30. A brief guide to donating to archives
  31. Metadata revisited: Best practices and prioritizing
  32. Understanding and using finding aids
  33. An introduction to born-digital materials
  34. Copyright follow-up questions and answers
  35. Why scan when you can shoot?
  36. Gallery of recent acquisitions
  37. Intellectual property
  38. Metadata
  39. Redesigned website
  40. Processing and submissions
  41. Scanning and digital files
  42. Introduction, organization, and metadata