Acquisition

Every historical records repository is involved in acquiring records or manuscripts.  You may collect materials from your local community, or materials pertaining to certain subjects or time periods.  You may also acquire administrative records from your parent organization.   Regardless of the source of your records it is important to consider how you acquire records, why you acquire them, and what records you collect. 

The sheer abundance of modern records requires you to define specific criteria for collecting records.  Adhering to a collection policy and appraisal criteria may occasionally require you turn down interesting or valuable collections offered to you. However, not following them ensures you will steadily reach the limits of your ability to care for your collections and you can find your staff overwhelmed by a processing backlog, your storage space full, and your budget depleted. 

With increased opportunities for making your collections available online, documenting ownership of your collections, and obtaining the legal title to your records is essential.   Without documenting ownership and title to your records you may not be able to reproduce them for an exhibit, or even make them available to researchers in your reading room.  Luckily, if you exercise appropriate diligence, acquiring rights to your collections through a Deed of Gift is relatively simple.         

Collecting and acquisition procedures allow your repository to increase the scope of its holdings. Most importantly following these procedures ensures your repository will hold coherent and related groups of records rather than a collection of interesting but unrelated documents. 

In the following video, Todd DeGarmo, Founding Director of the Folklife Center at Crandall Public Library in Glens Falls, NY discusses strategies for working with donors to acquire historical records for your collection.

In this section you will assess the following: