Developing the corporate memory: the potential of business archives

Abstract

An archivist looks back over a long career in archives and records management, notably at The Rothschild Archive, to review the different aspects of the work of the corporate archivist. Some typical functions of the corporate archive are illustrated with examples to show how such collections perform invaluable service to the parent company, including: the preservation of documents that can play a vital part in litigation or even in proving the legal existence of the company; the use of the information in archives to support corporate decision making; and the use of archival material for tracing and writing the company’s history. Pays particular attention to means of transforming archives to suit the current needs of business through a more dynamic approach to the exploitation of the information contained and the creation of the kind of “business support unit” which is far removed from the traditional notion of the archive and the archivist. The models proposed to support such a transformation depends upon two attitudinal prerequisites: that the business must have overcome the traditional definitions of archives; and that the company archive must be seen not as a passive burden but as an asset in both financial and institutional terms. Concludes by stressing that the paper archivist will still have an important role to play in the world of the Internet and the “paperless archive”. The ease with which electronic records can be lost through careless storage or ill-mapped networks is likely to make the archivist’s disciplines of greater, rather than lesser, importance.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.