The Status of Business Archives

Abstract

F OR some time the Committee on Business Archives of the Societyof American Archivists felt that a directory of business archivists would be helpful.To make a start on such a directory-even though it was realized that coverage would not be complete-a questionnaire was sent in May 1968 to over 700 U. S. and Canadian firms. 1 The American Records Management Association (ARMA) kindly agreed to let us use its address list.This was weeded to eliminate nonbusiness members and multiple members from the same firm.To include firms not in the ARMA listing, a further selection was made from the Fortune "500" list of corporations.Notices of the project were placed in certain of the library and archival journals.The committee realizes that some business archivists may have been overlooked.The questionnaire was somewhat similar to that used by the College and University Archives Committee in preparing its directory.2 Perhaps because of the questionnaire's origin in a university library, emphasis was placed on information of use to the researcher.This included the date when the archives was established, dates of the holdings, types of records collected, approximate size of the collection, and availability for use.But answers to these questions also revealed the nature and extent of the archives.The definition of business archives included in the letter accompanying the questionnaire was suppied by William Rofes of IBM, a member of the committee.For the 725 questionnaires sent out there were 216 replies, or about 30 percent.Of these, 83 (38 percent) were not included in the final listing, leaving 133 to be so included.8 Of those not included, a few (no more than 14) represented nonbusiness activities or commercial records management firms or libraries.The majority of those not included, though they had the courtesy to reply and in most cases had some aware-

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 — 4 citations exist upstream.