The development of business archives in the United States: An overview and a personal perspective

American Archivist

Volumn 60, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 8-33

  Adkins, Elizabeth W ^a  

^a FORD MOTOR COMPANY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33749157440     PISSN: 03609081     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.17723/aarc.60.1.qk640m762t10g348     Document Type: Review

References (26)

1. Meyer Fishbein, "Business Archives," Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science (New York: Dekker, 1968), 3:519-20.
2. Ralph M. Hower, "The Preservation of Business Records" (Boston: Business History Society, 1937).
3. Oliver W. Holmes, "The Evaluation and Preservation of Business Archives," American Archivist 1 (October 1938): 173.
4. Gary D. Saretzky, "North American Business Archives: A Developmental Perspective," The Business History Bulletin 4 (Winter 1990): 6.
5. Although Firestone is commonly reported as the first company to establish an archives in the United States, INA (a predecessor to today's CIGNA Corporation) established an archives department in 1942, one year earlier than Firestone. One could make the argument that INA's archives actually date back to 1881, when the board of directors authorized the officers of the company to select a "competent person to collect together the archives of the company." During the 1930s, Mr. Palmer, the head of the Advertising Department, was responsible for the archives; when he retired from the Advertising Department in 1942, he became full-time manager of the Archives Department. Despite INA's early interest in preserving their archives, a professional archivist was not hired until 1965, when the corporate secretary hired a professional to help prepare for the company's 150th anniversary. The evolution of INA's archives illustrates the difficulties in defining a "legitimate" corporate archives. [Information provided by CIGNA Archivist Claudette John in an e-mail message to the author, 16 January 1996.]
6. William D. Overman, "The Firestone Archives and Library," American Archivist 16 (October 1953): 307.
7. Arthur H. Cole, "The Accumulated Development of Unsolved Problems," Journal of Economic History 5 (May 1945): 52.
8. The four companies were IBM (1961), Gulf Oil (1965), Chicago Board of Trade (1968), and Educational Testing Service (1969).
9. David R. Smith, "An Historical Look at Business Archives," American Archivist 45 (Summer 1982): 275-76.
10. Programs established during the 1970s included Walt Disney Productions (1970), Ford Foundation (1970), International Harvester (now Navistar-1971), Anheuser-Busch (1971), United Technologies (1972), Corning Glass Works (1973), Weyerhaeuser Company (1974), Nationwide Insurance (1974), Wells Fargo Bank (1975), Chase Manhattan Bank (1975), Deere & Co. (1976), Gerber Products (1976), Georgia-Pacific Co. (1977), Los Angeles Times (1978), Nabisco (1978), Atlantic Richfield (1979), New York Stock Exchange (1979), and J. Walter Thompson Company (1979).
11. Smith, "An Historical Look at Business Archives," 276.
12. Helen L. Davidson, "Selling Management on Business Archives," ARMA Quarterly 3 (July 1969): 15-19.
13. Wilbur George Kurtz, Jr., "Business Archives in the Corporate Function," ARMA Quarterly 4 (April 1970): 5-11.
14. The Directory of Business Archives has been updated three times since the first edition in 1969. The most recent edition was published in 1990, and lists 160 companies and sixty-four archivists (unlike previous editions, it does not include professional and nonprofit groups, such as foundations, fraternal organizations, museums, or hospitals). The Business Archives Section is presently in the process of updating the information in the directory, and hopes to publish a revised edition by 1998. The current draft of the directory lists 258 companies and eighty-three archivists.
15. Burckel is now the Director of Libraries at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
16. Nicholas C. Burckel, "Business Archives in a University Setting: Status and Prospect," College and Research Libraries 41 (May 1980): 229.
17. For an analysis of some of the issues involved in collecting the records of small businesses, see Mark A. Greene, "Store Wars: Some Thoughts on the Strategy and Tactics of Documenting Small Businesses," Midwestern Archivist 16 (1991): 95-104.
18. For an example of some of these concerns, see Davidson, "Selling Management on Business Archives," 15.
19. George David Smith and Laurence E. Steadman, "Present Value of Corporate History," Harvard Business Review 59 (November/December 1981): 164-73.
20. Information provided to the author by Bank of America archivist Marilyn Ghausi in a fax dated 22 January 1996.
21. Information provided by Phillips Petroleum archivist Kathy Triebel in a telephone conversation with the author, 23 May 1997.
22. James M. O'Toole, ed., The Records of American Business (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1997).
23. See Ellen G. Gartrell's essay in this issue of the American Archivist.
24. Between 1964 and 1996, four individuals served as Ford's corporate archivist: Alice Benn, Beverly Fenbert, Denise Heppler, and Darleen Flaherty. Darleen Flaherty has worked at Ford's archives since 1980, and is currently assistant corporate archivist.
25. The author shared a draft of this article with colleagues prior to publication, and several remarked on this point. A number of individuals agreed that appraising records for their informational value in a business setting is of paramount importance. However, two people responded with thoughts that point out the need to explore the issue further. Claudette John from the CIGNA Archives stated, "I agree that appraising for information is important. I think it's the part that most of our users understand. I do not agree that it is more important than appraising for evidential value. Maybe it's because the CIGNA Archives' major customers are the corporate legal and secretarial departments, but we consciously document corporate secretarial, marketing, policy, human resources, product and financial functions for their evidentiary as well as for their informational value. And the records are used for both. In fact, the evidentiary value is there because we preserve the records, even if the company never needs to use them." [Excerpt from a letter written by Claudette John to the author, 10 June 1997.]
26. Business archives consultant Karen Benedict responded as follows: "I wish that you had the time to expand upon the paragraph that you devote to the question of appraisal of records in the corporate archives. I think that you are correct that most corporate archivists-rightly-appraise records on the base of informational value rather than evidential value. It is important to be able to provide the executives and employees with the information that they need from the archives. But it does skew what kinds of records will be found in a corporate archives. There is a strong possibility, based upon what I have seen over the years, that the corporate archives will not maintain a lot of potentially valuable information for the long term ability to examine the activities of the business in their entirety. What are the implications for this? If corporate archivists are unable to address this problem because of the demands on their time and resources to fulfill the information needs of their users- is there a possibility to collaborate with a major repository to collect and preserve records that would enable others to fully understand the successes and failures of the corporation?" [Excerpt from an e-mail written by Karen Benedict to the author, 12 June 1997.]