The future of access to public records? Public–private partnerships in US state and territorial archives

Abstract

This article examines the network of public archives and private sector organizations engaged in the work of digitizing historical records. Specifically, it focuses on the recent expansion of public–private partnerships involving US state and territorial archives and their effects on citizens’ access to digitized materials. Despite this expansion in the reach of partnerships, research investigating this phenomenon has not kept pace. Here, I present interview and documentary data gathered from government archivists and private sector employees from companies such as Ancestry.com, FamilySearch, and ProQuest. The results explain the processes by which these relationships form and function as well as how they affect access to records. Of particular importance are the ways in which private companies’ priorities drive the selection of records for digitization in these partnerships and how a changing access paradigm, whereby users search for records on third-party platforms, threatens to alienate government archival records from their provenance. This project is the first comprehensive study of public–private partnerships involving state and territorial archives in the USA and serves as the basis for future work.