Build an Archive Together: How to Collaborate with Multiple Archives

A Permanent Archive isn’t just another digital box or drive. It’s a gift for future generations and everyone knows that the best gifts are the ones you build together!

Permanent Archives can represent individuals, families and organizations. When you first create your account, we automatically establish your personal, individual archive. Your personal archive represents you, your profile, and your unique collection of files to be preserved.

But that’s only the beginning. You can create any number of additional archives for your family or the other people and organizations in your life. Then you can build these archives together with other users. When you’re done, you can even gift or transfer an archive to someone else.

Each Permanent Archive is owned by a single person, but files may be uploaded, edited, organized and shared by any number of members granted access to the archive.

Let’s create a “person archive” together to see how it works.

Step 1: Add a new Permanent Archive

While logged into your Permanent.org account, open the “archive selector” by clicking on your profile picture in the upper lefthand corner of any section in your archive.

If you are the owner or member of an archive, it will appear in the archive selector list. You can fast-switch back and forth between any of your archives here.

At the bottom of the archive selector list, you will find a blue button that says “Create Archive”. You can name your new Permanent Archive and establish if it is for a person, family or organization.

Step 2: Add Members to your Permanent Archive

To add someone who you want to build your Permanent Archive with you, navigate to the Member’s page of your Archive.

Click on the big blue plus button on the top right of your screen and enter the email address of the person you would like to add as a member.

This is also where you establish each member’s access level:

• Viewer: Can only view the contents of the Archive.
• Contributor: Can add files to the Archive.
• Editor: Can add files and edit descriptions and titles.
• Curator: Can add files and folders, edit descriptions and file names, and rearrange and delete files and folders.

Now you are all set to build together. Each member of an archive will find that archive in their own archive selector list.

Step 3: Create a profile and add files to your archive

The first thing you’ll want to do after creating your new archive is navigate to the Profile section and add important details about the person, family or organization you’ll be working on.

Then it’s time to head over to My Files to start collecting and organizing your most cherished memories and important documents.

Knowing where to start can feel overwhelming, so don’t try to bite off more than you can chew in your first sitting. Even if you only add one photo, video, or document today, you’ll still have created a Permanent Legacy that wasn’t there yesterday.

Step 4: Gift your Permanent Archive

Gifting an archive is the final and most satisfying step of creating archives for other people.

In the member’s page, just like in the previous step, click the blue plus button at the top of the page to add a new member to this Archive. This time, select “Owner” as the access level.

If this person hasn’t already created their own Permanent Archive, then they’ll receive a special gift message. Otherwise they’ll still become the owner of the archive.

Since there can only be one owner of a Permanent Archive, you will be made a curator of this archive once they’ve accepted.