n.an individual responsible for business recordsHives 1986, 44In 1943 the company [Firestone Tire and Rubber Company] secured the services of historian William Overman, who became North America’s first corporate archivist. Hives 1986, 51Consequently, the position of corporate archivist should not be entrusted to a long-time employee with an interest in the history of the company. Instead it should be filled by a professional archivist with a firm understanding of archival principles and information retrieval.Jones and Cantelon 1993, 3–4Ideally, a corporate archivist participates in corporate decisions about how information is created, maintained, and managed within the organization.Jones and Cantelon 1993, 15Additionally, many corporate archivists use the research data they assemble in the course of handling reference requests to prepare historical features for company publications and brochures.Jones and Cantelon 1993, 63Corporate archivists will encounter the need for an oral history program sooner or later.Jones and Cantelon 1993, 93As soon as the corporate archives received authorization, it is ready to begin development of the disaster recovery plan. This stage involves a learning process. The corporate archivist must discover what types of records the archives keeps, their value, special information about their potential vulnerability, their condition, their location, and other methods of protection that may already have been secured for them.McDowall 1993, 348The lot of a business archivist is becoming no happier. Corporate archivists have perennially been confronted by the daunting challenge of bringing order to the mountain of corporate documentation deposited on their doorstep. All too often, archivists have also been obliged to contend with the skepticism of their corporate masters, battling to maintain that the archives is a vital corporate function.Adkins 1997, 15–16Corporate archivists are finding that their programs can provide valuable management tools at times of reorganization, since, as noted above, archival sources can help provide a sense of continuity to employees beset by change and instability.Lasewicz 2015, 67Corporate archivists have always known that their function adds value, but the language of archives is not suited to demonstrating that archives are strategic to their firms. Instead, corporate archivists need to frame their business cases in terms executives care about.
