n.a record created or received for business purposesHolmes 1938, 176It is noteworthy that practically all the business records saved by libraries and historical societies so far, including the collection of the Business Historical Society at Harvard University, belong to the period before the expansion of record keeping and the development of card and loose-leaf systems. The technique for handling these modern devices must still be worked out.Gibb 1961, 339The question of what a librarian or archivist does with the business records his institution possesses and acquires can be answered only by taking a close look at the reasons why those records were kept or acquired. Often, of course, such collections just happen. They come fortuitously, and they repose in respectable, dusty oblivion. But, pressed to rationalize the situation, most archivists would say that they keep and acquire business records for active use—by historians, by members of the firm’s advertising department, or by the occasional executive or legal counselor seeking data from the past.King 1964, 387First of all, business records are not easily available to the historian. Records of active businesses are very difficult to obtain, because businessmen usually prefer to withhold or destroy records rather than risk information leaks to competitors or possible adverse publicity from the research done on their records. It follows that the most commonly held business records are those of defunct enterprises, for here the businessman is generally indifferent about information leaks to former competitors or about adverse publicity.Lewis 1969, 21Which business records should be retained? Which business records should be discarded? Every business archives with a space problem has appraisal criteria, formal or informal, for maintaining and disposing of materials. Every business archives threatened by a space shortage inevitably must develop such criteria.Blouin 1979, 312Business records have always posed particular problems for archivists, especially in the area of appraisal. Business collections are usually large and often appear to be incomprehensible. Although the prose portion, consisting of minutes, correspondence, and reports, can be read and understood easily, the major portion—the financial records—is less easily grasped.Hives 1986, 43[Ralph] Hower strongly believed in preserving business records so that accurate accounts of business could counter what he perceived to be a very real threat to the prevailing economic order, in which he evidently had faith despite the ravages of the depression . . .Rumm 1988, 70Efforts to collect and preserve business records gained greater momentum after the Second World War. More historical societies and university libraries joined the ranks of those repositories that had previously acquired business records, while the numbers of companies that established corporate archives and records management centres also increased.Rumm 1988, 89A few years ago, the writer attended a session at an archives conference on the appraisal and retention of business records. Most of the people attending the session were corporate records managers. We were given a list of fifty document categories, ranging from minutes to releases, representing the records of a hypothetical company, and were asked to identify the ten records series we would retain. As both a historian and an archivist, I selected records that in my opinion would offer the greatest potential for research: plant managers’ correspondence files, managers’ minutes, payrolls, time cards, personnel files. The records managers generally opted to retain press releases, advertisements, annual reports, proxies, prospectuses, and financial statements. I am not suggesting that any of the choices was wrong, but rather that the insights of archivists and historians may help to preserve records of potentially rich informational value that otherwise might be destroyed.Mitchell 1989, 48Publicly funded archival repositories in Canada lack the resources to cope with the enormous volume of records annually created by large corporations. Archivists writing about the preservation of business records have acknowledged this fact, and have concluded that companies should be encouraged to establish in-house corporate archives. But are corporate archives the only realistic means of preserving business records? Preoccupied with the idea of corporate archives, North American archival literature has paid little attention to the issues of preserving the records of the wide range of small businesses which still constitute a substantial part of the contemporary business world, and of preserving records of companies that cease to exist.Fode and Fink 1997, 73The collection, storage, and scientific use of records is a cultural act. This is obvious and no one would probably deny it. Nevertheless it is worth mentioning because it seems so obvious that it is often forgotten. This cultural perspective goes for private as well as public records, and business records are certainly no exception.Linard and Sverdloff 1997, 89Given Baker Library’s significant role both in the development of business history as an academic discipline and business records as a collecting focus, the study of the historic and current usage of these resources offers a rare opportunity to note general trends in the usage of business manuscript materials and predict future courses. Baker Library has come to hold one of the preeminent collections of historical materials on business history and economic history and philosophy in the world. Included in the collections are manuscripts, rare books, pamphlets, broadsides, photographs, prints, trade catalogs, trade cards, and corporate annual reports.Carpenter et al. 2011, 14By their nature, business records exist to support the economic viability of the business, because proprietary information gives a company a competitive advantage in the marketplace.Caron and Brown 2013, 157In an instant and in effect, Library and Archives Canada had turned the information management conversation completely upside down and shifted its traditional focus away from the identification and disposal of government’s documentary waste to the creation and capture of business records having ongoing value in support of public administration, in other words, from the disposal of unnecessary information to the “keeping of records” for business purposes.
