Corporate Archives

I have thought about working in a business/corporate archive. I personally don’t think it will be greatly different from working at public archives. I do realize that there will be differences… At corporate archives, I would might be archiving some records that promote their brand rather than focusing on the research value of the records. I might even be asked to destroy records that hurt the corporate brand. But, I think corporations are a part of our history and many make innovations and revolutions. Think of how much change has been brought on by various technology companies these days.

With the increase in the amount of information and the distributed model in which information is being created and stored, it does not seem possible for public institutions to keep up with all of the information that is worth saving. Some records that are worth archiving might only be accessible by internal employees and thus, they are the only ones that can save such records. I think we need every corporation to do their part to save whatever they can. Even though the corporate archives may present a biased collection of records, without corporate archives, we may end up with nearly no history of some corporations.

Unfortunately, I think the reality is that many companies do not focus much on archiving their history. Most are too caught up with day to day business and are already short on resources without having to worry about saving corporate records. The fact that a whole section is dedicated to provide sources of funding for corporate archives on Managing Business Archives (http://www.managingbusinessarchives.co.uk/getting_started/setting_up_an_inhouse_archive/sources_of_funding) seems to imply that many corporations do not have the funding or the resources to set up or maintain corporate archives. Only the well established companies with long history seem to be on SAA’s directory of corporate archives.

For corporations, I think archiving starts from records management. Managing Business Archives (http://www.managingbusinessarchives.co.uk/getting_started/sustaining_the_archive/) states on Sustaining the Archive section, that “the records management process also identifies current business records that will have archival or historical value in the future. Implementing a records management programme can enable your business to capture new accruals of archives, keeping the corporate archive collection up-to-date and dynamic” (2011, para 2). As the amount of information created by corporations has exceeded the amount that is easily manageable by a centralized records management department, we may be needing to count on every individual to save their records for the corporate memory to survive.