This part of our site is devoted to a Manual designed to assist with the development and operation of a local church or small organisation archive. It based on professional principles and uses traditional paper documents and processes which were the standard when it was first written in the 1990s. Since then, of course, the digital world has appeared, and this means that archiving procedures and policies have to make the transition. As far as archives are concerned, the new digital world is the same only different - the same because the end process is still to preserve records for as long as they are needed in such a way that they are well kept and accessible to those who will use them. However the records themselves are different, the processes used to create, manage and retrieve them are different, and the media on which they reside and means of managing them are different. There are other differences too, but that gives a simple outline of the situation. There are at least two aspects to going digital - one is to manage the documents now being created digitally (they are "born digital"), while the other is turn existing paper records into a digital form (so they become "re- born digital" documents), and then of course, to manage them in the same way as those born digital. For some information about this process of "digitisation" click here . Because virtually every new document (including video and graphic material) is now born