Business Archives: A Corporate Asset

Abstract

THERE WAS A TIME when business archives were a lovely bunch of cocoanuts* —nice things to have around, but nobody quite sure what to do with them. Now, they seem to have as many potential uses as remarkably practical and profitable fruit of coco palm —though both sometimes still look like scourge of earth. Business archives are coming of age as more and more companies reap benefits of one of their most useful and inexpensive corporate assets. Time-worn documents, leather-bound ledgers, longforgotten cartons of administrative files and faded photographs are being dusted off and integrated with computer printouts, magnetic tapes, microforms and laser discs, to create information data bases potentially as powerful as any a corporation has at its disposal. In legal affairs, marketing, advertising, operations research, strategic planning, real property management, personnel matters, public relations, management education, as well as other areas of corporate activity, impact of organized historical information systems, i.e., business archives with an information retrieval capacity, is being felt. And in business world, base line does not have to be very long. Anything older than about three months is history. In a way, it is ironic that emergence of American business archives, which takes a long-term commitment from a corporation, albeit with a view of long-term gain, occurs at a time when many observers are bemoaning myopic emphasis of modern American business organizations on short-term objectives. In their introduction to massive, yet entertaining, Everybody's Business: An Almanac (billed by Harper & Row as the irreverent guide to Corporate America), editors Milton Moskowitz, Michael Katz and Robert