Cultural Heritage Organizations Editing and Proofreading Services

A family brings in four boxes: photographs, a diary, letters, a reel of eight-millimetre film. They want it kept safe. Nobody in the room is thinking about who may publish the diary in 2050, whether the film may go online, what happens to the letters if the organisation closes, or whether the person who wrote them ever agreed to any of this — and the form on the desk is a receipt.

We edit what museums, archives and heritage organisations produce — deeds of gift and donation agreements, deposit and loan agreements, collection and acquisition policies, access and reproduction terms, oral history consent and release forms, catalogue and finding aid text, funding applications and reports, and the correspondence that manages a donor relationship over decades. Our editors work on documents that outlive everyone who signs them.

The deed of gift is the document that decides what an organisation may do with a collection forever, and its failure is a receipt dressed as an agreement. What is not granted at the point of donation is usually unobtainable afterwards. We work through these so the transfer of ownership is stated separately from the grant of rights, since a donor can give an object and retain copyright without realising they have done either; so the copyright position is addressed explicitly, including material the donor does not own — letters written by other people, photographs taken by studios — because this is the single most common defect in a heritage collection and it surfaces the first time somebody wants to publish; so the permitted uses are listed as activities the organisation actually does: cataloguing, digitisation, publication online, exhibition, reproduction in publications, licensing to third parties; so any restriction the donor wants is written with its duration and its end date rather than as "not to be made public", given that an open-ended restriction becomes permanent by default; so the organisation's right to deaccession, transfer or dispose is stated honestly, as silence here produces the worst conversations in the sector; so the position on unaccepted material is covered — what happens to items outside the collecting policy; so any personal data about living people is identified with how access will be managed; and so the donor is told in plain words what they are giving up. Deeds written this way let a collection be used.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including agreements, donor correspondence, collection information and policies. We are editors rather than archivists, curators or lawyers, and we offer no legal advice and no view on ownership, copyright or collection decisions. What we can do is make the agreement cover the next fifty years.