Support the CDAF

Keeping archives is expensive, and the cost is invisible. A photograph that spends sixty years in a cupboard asks nothing of anyone. The same photograph made available to the public means someone has found it, carried it, cleaned it, digitised it at high resolution, described it item by item, and stored it twice on two different media.

What your support pays for

• Digitisation. A collection arrives in boxes. Each item is photographed or scanned at a resolution that will still be readable in thirty years.
• Description. This is the longest and most decisive work: an image without a record stays unfindable, and therefore might as well not exist.
• Physical conservation. Acid-free boxes, a temperature-controlled room, redundant backups. All of which looks like nothing until something burns.
• Collection. Going to find the archives where they lie, and recording the testimony of those who can still give it.

Ways to support the centre

The centre welcomes one-off gifts, regular support and institutional partnerships. It also receives contributions in kind: working time, documentary skills, digitisation equipment, or hosting an exhibition.

The collection reserved for subscribed members contributes to this funding. A subscription opens access to premium items and pays directly for digitising the next ones.

If you have no money to give

You can give something else, and that is not a polite formula. An archive centre lives first on what is entrusted to it: a family photograph, a kept leaflet, a notebook, a recording. What sleeps in a cupboard may be exactly what collective memory is missing.

Making the collection known matters just as much. An archive nobody consults is kept for nothing.

Write to us

Practical arrangements are settled case by case, according to the nature and scale of the support you have in mind. Write to the centre saying what you would like to do, and the reply will set out the steps and, where relevant, the applicable tax treatment.

Page mise à jour le 13 September 2026.