March 15, 2025
Dear Friends, Welcome to Tiny Archives!
What began as an idea in graduate school in 2010 has grown into a tool designed for all of us — archivists, artists, creators, families, educators, and anyone with a collection to preserve. In recent years, as the landscape of digital reformatting and personal preservation evolved, so too did the need for a solution for archival description that is accessible, intuitive, and built to serve the many different people stewarding archival materials, especially our own personal archives.
Our Founder, and Independent Archivist and small business owner of My Personal Archives, spent years listening to other Artists, Independent Archivists, families, and collection stewards. Time and again, she saw the same challenge emerge—there simply is no tool to easily — and affordably — describe and structure archival collections. At the heart of archives and preservation is the Finding Aid, the essential guide that ensures materials remain discoverable and accessible.
We incorporated Tiny Archives 23 months ago on April 11, 2023 to build FACTool — our Finding Aid Creation Tool — with this in mind: to empower individuals and small archives with a straightforward, effective way to describe and document collections. We created this tool to secure and preserve our personal and collective histories, ensuring they — and anybody with what our Founder calls Archival Tendencies — can be part of the historical record — and to fend off Archival Silences in historical record. We respect our privacy and yours and offer you the choice—whether to share your collections publicly in our nascent archival repository for researchers, writers, and future generations, or to simply preserve, secure, and revisit your personal archives privately.
We recognize that creating a finding aid can be a deeply personal, even cathartic, experience—one that allows us to see our own personal histories through our documents, photographs, artworks, and other materials meaningful to us. FACTool is built not only to structure and describe collections but also to seamlessly link out to digital and physical repositories where your materials are housed. We intentionally keep our searchable repository separate from cloud-based storage services that require costly monthly and annual subscriptions, and are notoriously difficult to migrate from. Instead, we provide simple linking solutions to perpetual repositories like Permanent.org, Forever.com, and pCloud.com.
As we launch, we’re committed to supporting our community every step of the way. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll offer free live Office Hours where you can learn to create Finding Aids in FACTool and get guidance on processing archival materials. FACTool is built to align with archival standards: DACS (Describing Archives: A Content Standard) for the U.S. and ISAD(G) (International Standard for Archival Description) for our global users. At launch, we provide basic support in 17 languages—you can explore our open-source work on our Wiki.
Tiny Archives is more than just a tool—it’s a growing community of people dedicated to preservation. We invite you to join us in this mission. Whether you are an archivist, artist, educator, family historian, or someone caring for a collection, you are in the right place.
Join us and let’s build something enduring, together.
Welcome to Tiny Archives.
For Archivists
We are Independent Archivists and Archival Consultants stewarding and managing archival collections for our private clients, and organizations and institutions. We are charged with preserving and securing historical records, processing archival collections, and developing finding aids, Tiny Archives is building the tools and ecosystem to support our work. Join us to ensure that archives—of all sizes—remain accessible, well-documented, and enduring for future generations.
For Artists and Creators
We are Artists and Creators with personal archival collections that hold the story of our work, our process, our evolution, and our lives. We create and hold art works on paper, diaries and journals, sketchbooks, digital files, sound recordings, photography and film, and ephemera, Tiny Archives provides us the tools and ecosystem to preserve, curate, and share our creative and personal legacy. Our work deserves to be seen, remembered, and passed on. We can begin to build our living archive today.
For Educators and Students
We are Educators and Students teaching and learning across disciplines—history, literature, humanities, science, mathematics, engineering, and beyond. From class projects to theses, from research archives to teaching collections, Tiny Archives offers a space to build and steward archival collections. FACTool can aid and enhance learning, collaborate on knowledge-building, and connect your academic work to a larger archival community.
For Families and Family Historians
Families with Archival Tendencies and Family Historians entrusted with the stewardship of personal and ancestral collections. From photographs to letters, home movies to heirlooms, we know that preserving family history is preserving identity. Tiny Archives provides a dedicated space to safeguard, describe, and share your family’s story—so it can be discovered and cherished for generations to come.
For Tiny Archives
We are tiny organizations creating and stewarding repositories of institutional records and collections of historical, artistic, cultural, faith-based, religious and spiritual, and scientific significance. Many of us are managed by a staff of one, a Lone Arranger, or armies of paraprofessional and volunteer archivists, balancing stewardship, access, and preservation with limited resources. Whether we care for a museum collection, a local history archive, or a specialized research repository, Tiny Archives is built for us. Small archives hold big histories—let’s capture, preserve, and secure them together for the enduring historical record.
Join Tiny Archives
Preserve, describe, and share your collections with a tool built for archivists, artists, educators, students, family historians, and organizations with records and archives. Whether you are safeguarding personal materials or managing institutional records, Tiny Archives gives you the power to document and connect your history to the future. Join Tiny Archives and be part of a growing community dedicated to archives, preservation, and lasting discovery.
Individual
$10.00 month/$100 year
We are Archivists, — Consultants, Independents, and Lone Arrangers —and Educators, Students, Artists and Creators
Family
$20 month/$200 year
We are Families and Family Historians.
Organization
$500 a year
We are tiny Archives, and Arts, Cultural, Historical, Faith and Religious Organizations with Archival and institutional and Archival collections
What is FACTool?
FACTool is our Finding Aid Creation Tool—a simple, intuitive, and standards-based tool for describing archival collections. Think of it as a table of contents for your personal papers and collections, helping you document, preserve, and structure archival materials in a meaningful way. FACTool follows DACS (Describing Archives: A Content Standard) for the U.S. and ISAD(G) for international users, guiding you through essential archival descriptive elements.
What is Tiny Archives?
Tiny Archives is an independent, archivist-led platform built for people who care about preserving personal and historical materials. Whether you’re an archivist, artist, family historian, or educator, Tiny Archives provides the tools and resources to help you describe and safeguard collections. We are an independently operated Delaware C-corp, designed and led by Jennifer Frémont, Archivist, Curator, and Technologist, alongside a dedicated team of engineers, many of whom are alumni from her college and graduate school communities. Tiny Archives is bootstrapped, and our team is building for the future with passion and purpose.
What does FACTool do?
FACTool allows users to create, edit, open, import, and export Finding Aids that describe archival collections. You can import existing Finding Aids and export them in widely used formats such as DOCX, PDF, CSV, EAD, and HTML. FACTool also includes a Collection Inventory feature to help document materials comprehensively.
In addition to personal use, you have the choice to share collection descriptions publicly in our archival repository, making them accessible for research and discovery.
FACTool is optimized for Mac and mobile, with the best experience on Firefox and Safari browsers. Our roadmap includes continuous improvements and an upcoming iOS app for the Apple App Store coming soon.
What about AI?
Our Founder and her Co-Founder are developing a dedicated AI copilot to enhance archival workflows while maintaining transparency, ethics, and user control. We understand and respect concerns about AI and are committed to thoughtful, responsible development. Our approach is shaped by the real needs of archivists, creators, and collection stewards, ensuring AI tools enhance—not replace—human expertise.
What about user privacy?
Tiny Archives values privacy, security, and user control. We do not use tracking cookies, nor do we sell your data. We only use session cookies for a seamless experience, and all changes are saved in our secure database. You choose whether to share your collections in our repository, and all data remains under your control.