Why Value Archives?
- To better understand a society, its people, and their activities
- To provide primary information about society's activities to help citizenry and scholars recognize and evaluate these events for themselves, so that they may discern truth and reality from fiction and biases
- To support an accurate and diverse documentary record of human existence and human action
- To foster a sense of community and to strengthen civic pride based on a shared and documented history
- To provide support for understanding the community and how communities form the building blocks of state, national, and global societies
- To evaluate the role a community played in historical events on a state, national, or international scale
- To ensure administrative continuity as organizations and businesses function and evolve
- To ensure a smooth-running society governed with order and efficiency
- To hold public officials accountable with organized public records that can be viewed by citizenry
- To help ensure freedom
- To hold liable those who stifle mores, repress societies, and otherwise degrade human rights
- To secure property rights and provide evidence of ownership
- To provide evidence against those who break laws
- To make materials available for review for assistance with planning, allowing us to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and to focus on the successful ideas of others that have been committed to record
- To promote efficiency in records management programs by distinguishing materials with long-term evidential, informational, and historical value
- To promote the study of a town or organization to researchers
- To market a community and promote tourism using a deep knowledge about the community's history and strengths
- To recognize and support the links among all institutions and individuals that create and collect documents in society
- To evaluate society and distinguish trends from more permanent traits of diversified culture
- To support the provenance and documentation of collections of objects
- To support the management of secondary-source collections such as those found in a library
- To support and supplement public education and lifelong learning
- To serve as illustrative works for educational, cultural, and other diversified programming
- To preserve cherished memories of family, friends, and community
- To define one's own identity and have some reassurance of one's continued memory through personal documentation
To preserve symbolic value through a document's embodiment of a particular idea (for example, the Declaration of Independence symbolizing the USA and freedom to Americans)
Can you think of more reasons to value archives? Write to us at melissa@archivesinfo.com
From the book Cultural Heritage Collaborators