The Academic Archives of the Future

Through the decades, academic archives have experimented with different approaches in documenting their institutions, from writing appraisal policies to establishing records management programs to experimenting with functional analysis and other appraisal models. Increasingly, faculty are creating and maintaining personal papers and research data in digital rather than paper format. Faculty offices ought to be less cluttered than they were a generation ago. The real issue that academic archivists need to face is how to adjust their practices to accommodate new digital information systems. They need to think about how they can redefine their mission. Without a redefinition of mission, the academic archives of the future may be nothing more than museums of old documentation forms. The existing digital information will be held by other units on campus -- units where there is a lack of appreciation for the importance of archives as sources for memory history and essential evidence.