College and Research Libraries W O O D R O W W . W A S S O N Organizing and Administering a University Archives University archives are being established in an increasing number of institutions. Their proper nature is defined, and practical sugges- tions concerning their management are proposed. These include remarks on appraisal of material, sources of data, arrangement and description of archives, their appropriate statutory basis, and staff and spatial requirements for their satisfactory operation. Also de- scribed are proper conditions for the utilization of university archival material. I n 1949 the Committee on College and University Archives of the Society of American Archivists surveyed institutions of higher learning to determine the num- ber and type of archival programs.1 The survey was limited to one hundred and fifty colleges and universities, which in- cluded institutions of differing sizes, classes, and geographical locations. Because of the new interest in college and university archives induced by the 1949 survey, the Committee followed the first with a second survey that attempted through a questionnaire to determine trends in archival programs operating in 1962. Approximately two hundred col- leges and universities were added to the original one hundred and fifty sampled, making a new total of three hundred and fifty. As in the earlier sur- vey, the institutions were selected on the bases of geographical location, kind, 1 D . H. Wilson, "Archives in Colleges and Uni- versities; Some Comments on Data Collected by the Society's Committee on College and University Ar- chives," American Archivist, XIII (October 1 9 5 0 ) , 3 4 3 - 5 0 . Dr. Wasson is Vanderbilt University Ar- chivist and Curator of Special Collections, Joint University Libraries, Nashville. and size. 2 The reports of these surveys constitute prime sources of information on academic archives. Another source of information on university archives is College and Uni- versity Archives in the United States and Canada, a directory of archival agencies and personnel.3 Compiled in 1965-66 and published in the latter year by the Committee on College and Uni- versity Archives of the Society of Ameri- can Archivists, this source is based upon a questionnaire which sought to elicit information regarding the personnel in charge of college and university archives and to outline briefly the holdings of their institutions. Only four-year colleges, universities, and seminaries accredited by one of the regional accrediting agen- cies were included in the compilation. The United States Office of Education's Education Directory, Fart 3 was used to determine the list of institutions to be polled. 2 Philip P. Mason, "College and University Archives: 1962." American Archivist, XXVI (April 1 9 6 3 ) , 1 6 1 - 6 5 . • 3 College and University Archives in the United States and Canada, compiled by the College and University Archives Committee of the Society of American Archivists, Robert M. Warner, chairman (Ann Arbor, Mich.: 1 9 6 6 ) . / 109 110 / College 6- Research Libraries • March 1968 From these data the following general- izations and conclusions can be made re- garding university archives: ( 1 ) there is currently considerable activity and inter- est in university archives administration, and since 1949 there has been a sig- nificant acceleration in programing, with the 1960's showing the greatest gain; ( 2 ) present personnel is by and large un- trained in archival science, with few institutions having archivists who give their entire time to the university ar- chives; ( 3 ) there is widespread con- fusion as to the scope of a modern insti- tutional archives; ( 4 ) there are startling misconceptions about the nature and meaning of archives; ( 5 ) there is need for a standardized and uniform state- ment of procedure (preferably evolved from the Committee on College and Uni- versity Archives of the Society of Ameri- can Archivists) for the creation and ad- ministration of a university archives. Inasmuch as new university archival programs are being created at a rela- tively rapid rate, and since there is indi- cation that this rate will be accelerated in the next f e w years, the following re- marks are offered in the hope that they will help fill a need for administrators of institutions of higher learning which are contemplating the formation of uni- versity archives. Of necessity the state- ment is brief, presenting only general guidelines, principles, and techniques. It is the result, however, of an analysis of the literature, formal training, and ex- perience in the creation and administra- tion of a university archives. M E A N I N G AND N A T U R E OF UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES University archives are records of en- during value created by an institution of higher learning as it accomplishes in official ways and activities the purposes for which the institution exists. Records of any kind of institution have a life history, proceeding from the current (ac- tive), through the semicurrent (semi- active), to noncurrent (inactive). It is at the point or time when records be- come noncurrent that they become ar- chives. Thus the official noncurrent rec- ords of the university first become uni- versity archives and then, following ap- praisal, become archives of enduring value. They become the "official mem- ory" of the university and the source for the record accumulated experience of an educational community. Archives usually are created by some planned activity or transaction related to university life carried on by faculty mem- bers, administrators, and students. They are the graphic products recording what was at one time the living experience of constituent units and members of the university community. A listing of university archives would include the official records of the vari- ous offices, departments, and schools; the personal papers accumulated during the tenure of individual members of the facul- ty; such official publications of the uni- verity as circulars of information, cata- logs of course offerings, and bulletins; monographs and serials published by the university press; theses and dissertations; and official publications of the student body and alumni associations. A good rule to follow in determining what types of material constitute university archives is that anything produced by the univer- sity in a planned and official way is archival. All material about the universi- ty is nonarchival. The historian's distinc- tion between primary and secondary sources is helpful here; that is, records created by an individual or institution are primary source materials whereas those about an individual or institution are secondary source materials. The rationale of a university archives is found in the uses to which it is put. It has administrative, research, and teaching uses. It assists in the adminis- tration of the university by having in Organizing and Administering a University Archives / 111 one central location and under single supervision the records of enduring value. All legal documents are likewise in one repository where the greatest se- curity and protection are given. Each of these uses contributes to administra- tive efficiency and to financial and spatial economy when the operation of the uni- versity as a whole is considered. The research value of archives is patent to the social, cultural, intellectual, educational, or economic historian. The disciplines of personnel management and institutional organization sometime find here ample grist for their research mills. Research energizes and illuminates teach- ing. The university archives is in some ways a research laboratory, and when functioning as such it makes its contribu- tion to the processes of teaching. It is well to note here that most universities known for their excellence in teaching and research, especially on the graduate level, also have creditable archival pro- grams. A P P R A I S A L A N D T R A N S M I T T A L When organizing an archival program at a university, one of the first questions asked by the archivist is: Where are the university archives and how much ma- terial is there? An answer can be found by means of a preliminary survey of all possible locations and kinds of archival material. The survey will entail conferences with all deans of schools, heads of de- partments, student leaders such as edi- tors of student publications and frater- nity presidents, and executive personnel of all non-academic administrative units. Such material may b e located in all parts of the campus. In many instances its original order may have been destroyed and the importance of its preservation and security ignored. Unfortunately, moreover, important files may well have been destroyed through impulsive weed- ing by sincere but misguided personnel of high or low station. By means of such a survey one ac- complishes many things in addition to obtaining an answer to his original ques- tion. The contacts made with faculty, ad- ministrators, and students and the knowl- edge gained of the history and organiza- tion of the university are absolutely nec- essary. Without these assets appraisal, transmittal, and arrangement of the archives would be ineffectual and would come to naught. The survey by the archivist should in effect contribute to the bulk of material that the institution's officers have al- ready decided to be archival. The paper wrapped bundles found in vaults, the old metal file cases transferred to some closet, or the jammed transfer file cases indiscriminately piled in some out-of- the-way place, may well form the nu- cleus of the archives. During the pre- liminary survey and inventory, consul- tation with the academic and adminis- trative officials in charge of such materi- al should elicit decisions as to whether it should be disposed of, selected from, or transferred in toto to the archives. The criteria of evidential and infor- mational value are always used to dis- tinguish "high content" from "low con- tent" archives. Evidence and information regarding the transaction of official busi- ness in relation to policy matters, espe- cially where changes are made, produce archives of great value and thus must be preserved. "High content" archives will seldom exceed 10 per cent of the total archival material; a decision as to amount is always made in relation to such considerations as space and future evidential and informational value. It is here that professional training in archival administration, history, and in- stitutional organization serves the archi- vist particularly well. The transmittal of university archives usually takes place following initial ap- 112 / College 6- Research Libraries • March 1968 praisal in the office of creation, with appraisal often continuing after the rec- ords are transmitted. Each administra- tive and academic unit ideally should have a planned schedule for the trans- mittal of its archives. It is in the trans- mittal of records that the archival pro- gram needs most to be undergirded by university authority. At the outset the archivist of any in- stitution greatly needs a clearly defined status, if he is to be really effective. He should be authorized and supported by the administration through action of the board of trustees or by a directive from the office of the highest executive of the university. An archivist can do much through persuasion and reason, but soon or late the occasion will arise when even these tactics are not able to penetrate fixed misunderstandings and prejudices. In some instances the archi- vist's position is further strengthened through an archives committee composed of the principal university representa- tives whose interests are involved and whose advice is needed. The issuance of a charter or notice of regulations by the highest executive to the archives-producing offices of the in- stitution can be helpful in notifying the educational community of what the archival program aims to accomplish. In this communication, the archivist's position and full authority has to be made clear. Heads of academic and ad- ministrative units are at times reluctant to give up to an "outsider" records of a school, a department, or administrative agency. This attitude is often based on a misconception that there is no dis- tinction between the private papers, which are a product of the personal ac- tivities of an official, and the records which result from his work for the insti- tution. He has no right willfully to de- stroy or to keep the latter, since they are the records of the institution and not his personal property. Hence the need is often for more than information and education carried on by the archivist; it is for administrative force and clarifica- tion. After a "Transmittal of Records" form has been filled in by the archivist, which includes a general description of the material and other appropriate informa- tion, the archives are transferred to the university archives area where they are accessioned and held for arrangement and description. ARRANGEMENT A N D DESCRIPTION The principles for arranging and de- scribing archives are equivalent to those for classifying and cataloging books. The primary objective of both the archivist and the librarian when following these procedures is the same; it is to gain control of the material under his super- vision. The records that eventually become archives should be kept as they were originally filed. Every basic unit (or rec- ords series, in the tenninology of the archivist) should be preserved. Exam- ples of this might be the minute books of a particular faculty or the file of cor- respondence of a dean's office. These should be preserved as they originated in the issuing office, and no attempt should be made to integrate them with a file of someone's correspondence, an- nual announcements, or any other item in a chronological or subject arrange- ment. The original order which an or- ganic body of records assumed as it was being created and formed is inviolable to archivists. All attempts to group let- ters by subject matter or to run together disparate materials such as alumni bulle- tins, promotional material, and corre- spondence into one file because they were produced in the same year, or to unify the records of different offices, are to be shunned. If this system of integration of archival material were followed, the result would be confusion. Honoring the Organizing and Administering a University Archives / 113 principles of provenance has been found through practice by American archivists to be the best way of gaining control over archives. The principle of provenance forces the archivist to disapprove of persons sending small batches of material that are parts or will later be parts of an organic body. Individual documents or small batches of records should be con- sidered a part of a definite series of records with its own organic unity. If broken by such a process of selection —consequently isolation—the precious items are rendered less understandable. The archivist preserves and uses the arrangement given the records by the uni- versity agency of origin on the assump- tion that this arrangement had logic and meaning to the academic or adminis- trative agency and that if the personnel of the agency could find and use the records when they were active, in con- nection with the many daily transactions and housekeeping activities of the agen- cy, the archivist can do the same when the records become archives. Revision of the order in which the archives come to the university destroys what archi- vists call the principle of provenance. This principle is indicated on an upper level by the expression respect des fonds (maintaining the natural archival bodies of creating agencies or offices separately from each other) and on a lower level within the fonds by the phrase respect pour Yordre primitif (respect for the original order). Stated in a simple gen- eral way, arrangement then becomes for the records of any one university agency the task of determining and verifying the original order, filling and labeling of the archives containers to reflect it, and shelving of the containers in the estab- lished order. The preservation and natural arrange- ment of records according to the office of their origin and, whenever possible, according to the order or system in which they were formed and created gives to the university archives a clearly defined diagrammatic unity. The whole is made up of parts called record groups, i.e., the records of the board of trustees, of the president, of the various schools and subordinate departments according to the date of establishment, and so on down the hierarchical arrangement. Thus according to this arrangement the or- ganizational history of the university is reflected and easily recognizable. More- over, as offices continue despite changes in personnel, so the documentary arti- facts of their work, which are in time the main evidence of their accomplish- ment, continue in unbroken and distinct lines. The arrangement scheme for archives can be thought of as proceeding from the general to the particular. This is a gen- eral equivalent for the librarian's prin- ciple for the classification of knowledge when cataloging books. Oliver W. Holmes alludes to the principle of going from the general to the particular when he writes of archival arrangement in five different operations at five different levels. 4 Though Dr. Holmes is thinking of his five levels of arrangement as the depository level, the record group and subgroup level, the series level, the filing unit level, and the document level in the context of United States archives, they are nevertheless pertinent to the over-all arrangement of university ar- chives as well. Going from the general to the particular, the levels are (with some modification) illustrated as follows: al- lowing the university archives of a par- ticular educational institution to repre- sent the first depository level, the school of arts and sciences (or engineering, etc.) the group level, the department of chemistry (or history, etc.) the sub- * For a detailed discussion of the five levels see, Oliver W . Holmes, "Archival Arrangement—Five D i f - ferent Operations at Five Different Levels," American Archivist, XXVII (January 1 9 6 4 ) , 2 1 - 4 1 . 114 / College 6- Research Libraries • March 1968 group level, the official minutes of a de- partment the series level, and the official minutes of a single meeting of a depart- ment the document level. As can be interpreted, the five steps above refer to the arrangement of the records themselves, independently of their containers. They suggest and estab- lish the order or sequence in which rec- ords ought to be placed in containers, labeled, and shelved. When all of these steps are completed the archives of an institution of higher learning may be said to be under con- trol. Complete item control may never be established, for time and expense necessary at the document level may not justify such detailed and refined arrange- ment. Because finding aids must refer to specified units in an established ar- rangement, however, control must be established to an acceptable degree be- fore description of the records is possi- ble. When applied to documentary ma- terial of which university archives are an excellent example, description of the holdings of the archival depository cov- ers all activities that must be performed in preparing finding aids. They are of various types, being comprehensive or limited in their coverage, general or detailed in their descriptive informa- tion, and pertaining to records units of various sizes. These aids may include guides, inventories, calendars, catalogs, lists, and indexes. The qualities by which archives are described are both substantive and phys- ical. They may be described substan- tively in this instance in relation to the corporate body—the university—that pro- duced them, the functions that resulted in their production, and their subject content. They may be described struc- turally as to their physical type, vol- ume, composition, and other physical characteristics. An archivist may well spend his en- ergies on unproductive projects if he does not develop a sound descriptive program. Furthermore, an improper pro- gram will lead to confusion and defeat of the major objective for which the program exists, that of control of the archives. Here the technique of collec- tive description provides a good way to attain control over the documentary data or holdings of a repository. It will pro- vide for the archivist the method for first describing archives collectively by groups and series, and, thereafter, only if their character and value justify in- dividual treatment, by single items. A descriptive program for university archives should be designed to produce finding aids in a form that will best make known the content and significance and best facilitate the use of the ar- chives. The two forms are card and page. The card form is more appropriate to archival finding aids whenever the ar- chival unit to be described is a dis- crete entity and it is desirable to indi- cate where information on specific sub- jects is to be found in the archives. In- formation concerning certain kinds of documentary material can be made more quickly apparent and can be more fully presented, however, in page form. The page form is better suited to the descrip- tion of archival series that have an or- ganic or other relation to each other. The page form gives greater space for the provenance of the series which usu- ally cannot be indicated in a f e w words. The content, arrangement, and signifi- cance of particular series thus have the greater space of the page form. STAFF, E Q U I P M E N T , AND LOCATION Staffing, equipping, and locating the university archives will in most cases be determined by the educational stand- ards, economic resources, amount of archival material, and the student-facul- ty-administrative population of the uni- Organizing and Administering a University Archives / 115 versity. The current status of American university archives runs the gamut from poorly to excellently trained staffs; from archaic to functionally, aesthetically su- perior equipment; and from being lo- cated in small, isolated rooms of the li- brary building or some other edifice to spacious and easily accessible quarters in the main library or administration building. The most important member of the university archives is the archivist whose academic training should be commen- surate to that of the best trained mem- bers of the faculty of the university. Graduate training, preferably in his- tory, is a necessity. In addition to this scholarly training, specialized training in the principles and techniques of archival administration is a desideratum. Fortunately, this can be got in the graduate departments of history of a few universities, counting towards degree re- quirements in history. Also, for many years creditable institutes and seminars in archival administration (in conjunc- tion with major universities) have been offered annually in various centers of archival activity. To procure an imagi- native and competent archival adminis- trator, trained on the doctoral level in history (or a closely allied discipline of learning) and in archival science, the Committee on College and University Archives of the Society of American Archivists has suggested that it may be necessary for the university to grant at least the academic rank of associate pro- fessor. With the appointment of the ar- chivist, the number and kind of staff as- sistants can be determined. A small uni- versity archives will begin with the minimum of an archivist, an assistant processor, and a secretary. The facilities and equipment of a uni- versity archives will be oriented toward receiving, processing, storing, and uti- lizing the archives. A good functional depository will consist of administrative offices, a search room, a processing room, and a housing area for the archives. Each office and room will have the ap- propriate equipment and furniture such as typewriters, tables, archives boxes, labelling set and paper, acid free fold- ers, and a paper cleaning kit. It is usu- ally best to have such processes as fumi- gation and lamination done initially by a commercial firm. Until it is determined whether or not there is and will be enough archival material needing these technical preservative measures to justi- fy purchasing such expensive pieces of equipment, the university archives will probably want to contract them. The location of university archival de- positories on campuses at institutions of higher learning in the United States has most often been either in the central administration building or in the main library building. The vast majority are located in the main library. One institu- tion is in the formative stage of erecting a single building. 5 Whatever its loca- tion—whether a division or department of the library, the president's office, or an independent agency within the organ- izational structure of the university—the university archives must function at an independent level if it is to fulfill the principles and techniques of sound ar- chival administration. Its internal or- ganization is independent of all other administrative units but interdependent with the total educational function of the university in its teaching, research, and administration. UTILIZATION The archives of a university are rec- ords of enduring value and as such are to be used with care and under condi- tions of security. They are to be used in the search room under the supervision 6 The merits as to location of the university archives is discussed by John Melville Jennings, "Archival Activity in American Universities and Colleges," American Archivist, XII (April 1 9 4 9 ) , 1 5 5 - 6 3 . 116 / College 6- Research Libraries • March 1968 of the archivist or an assistant, only by those authorized by the head of the is- suing office and the university archivist. In many instances the archivist or a member of his staff can assist the user by telephone or written communication. Authorization, however, for giving in- formation contained in the archives must still come from the proper source. Either oral or written instruction de- scribing the care and use of the archives is given to each user. All of this may appear to the person using the archives as an exercise of undue security meas- ures and of venting compulsions of con- trol and possessiveness. An explanation, however, that the material is documen- tary data can go far towards dispelling the feeling of undue restrictions to the user. The major activities and objectives of a university are teaching and research, cooperatively pursued and furthered by students, faculty, and administrative per- sonnel. The dimensions in which these have occurred, do occur, and will occur are the past, the present, and the future. The university's existence and rationale in this continuum are known only through its documentary data. If its past is to illuminate the present and give planned guidance to the future, the uni- versity archives are a necessity.