I really advise people when you start looking at your collections, and your family documents, and your letters, your pictures: prioritize what you feel is really important. Take the stuff that's most important to you, most important to your family, most important to your history, and start with those first. Look for the best home possible for them first. If you try to start the project by thinking you're going to take care of everything you've owned -- every single piece of paper your family or you have collected over the years -- you'll be overwhelmed, and you won't get anywhere. So really try to prioritize and look at what is really important to you, and work your way down.
When you come across a collection that you have had in a box for years and it's a mixture of newspapers, photographs, letters, booklets, corsages, buttons -- when you want to decide to organize your collection, what I advise you to do is to separate the different medias. A piece of newspaper is a lot different from a photograph, and the media that you're dealing with, and the environment that's best stored in. A newspaper is best stored in a -- higher pH level environment, where a photograph is going to need a pH of seven; very neutral environment. So go through your collection and separate the different -- and you can separate them into sizes -- all your postcards in one, your larger, oversized letters, your newspapers in another place and start there, start with one collection. And then you're going to try to get boxes that will best fit those particular size objects.
Once you've got your piles and everything is divided, and you want to label and differentiate between your pieces, the one thing I say -- never to -- to try to avoid labeling directly on the object. One of my biggest enemies is the post-it note. No matter -- it's adhesive -- and it doesn't matter that you cannot see the little bit of adhesive on the back of a post-it note, but the adhesive is there. And once you attach it to a letter, the adhesive stays. And what that adhesive will do, even if you pull it off, the longer you leave it on, the worse the damage, but even if you pull it off immediately, it leaves a residue behind. You may not be able to see it, you may not be able to feel it, but what it will attract is dirt. Dirt and dust will be attracted to that surface.
I discourage people from even putting them on boxes as a label. They are temporary. They are not meant to remain permanent. You could walk away and six months later, that post-it note could be on the floor. It's not going to be on your box and you will have lost that documentation on there.
You can write directly on the box, on the outside of the box. I advise putting a piece of paper inside your box that lists everything that's in there.
