A Profile of College and University Archives in the United States

Abstract

more concerned with its own history as the profession has evolved. This is particularly true of college and university archivists, now the largest group of archivists, defined by employer, in the United States. In an effort update previous surveys, a detailed questionnaire was circulated a 10-percent sample of archivists at institutions of higher education. The results of the survey, reported in this article, are of particular interest in that they include data reflecting the remarkable growth in the number of these archival institutions in the decade of the 1970s. The survey also sheds new light on the nature, strengths, and weaknesses of these programs and represents a baseline from which the developments of the 1980s can be measured. The growth and development of archives at colleges and universities has been monitored periodically through a series of surveys made since the formation in 1949 of the College and University Archives Committee of the Society of American Archivists. In the summer of 1949 the committee conducted a survey among 200 colleges and universities, selected include as wide a range as possible, in order to determine the extent of archival awareness in institutions of higher learning in the United States and Canada.1 Eighty-four institutions responded that they had some form of archives or historical manuscript collection, but the picture was generally a bleak one few institutions apparently understood the distinction among institutional records, historical manuscripts, and local public records.