During the past half-century, an increasing number of American academic institutions established archives, and numerous academic archives owe their existence to efforts by dedicated historians to preserve and document their heritage. Although public interest in safeguarding heritage materials continues to grow, recent economic challenges confront…

This article presents the findings of an exploratory study that investigated how users of archival material deal with the copyright-like restrictions that archives place on reuse of their holdings. In interviews with seventeen historians and genealogists, the author explored their awareness of copyright when reproducing archival holdings, their…

College and universities were slow to start collecting records relating to the history of their institutions. In the nineteenth and into the twentieth century it was usually a dedicated librarian, administrator, or professor who decided to rescue the history of their school. Educating archivists to assume this role has become a top priority for…

Local records are the foundation on which social history is constructed. However, in an era when most historians categorize themselves as social historians, it is amazing to note how much these primary resources appear to be underutilized in scholarly works. This article attempts to understand why this is so by investigating how it is that…

Archivists have created millions of digital primary source images that have contributed to the transformation in history teaching. This generation of students arrive on the college campus familiar with primary source documents but as yet unprepared to search finding aids or understand archival collections. This review of archival, educational, and…

This article is an exploration of oral history practice within the context of a performing arts archive. It addresses the deceptively simple question of what oral historians should actually ask their respondents and, ultimately, how much do we, as researchers, really want to know. The use of oral history material is discussed from a historical…