n. (also non-current record)a record no longer used in the regular course of business but which may be preserved and occasionally used for legal, historical, or operational purposesNewsome 1939a, 8State centralization and administration of noncurrent state and local archives leaves unsolved the larger and more complex problem of producing archives under conditions conducive to their preservation and of administering the current as well as the noncurrent records that remain in the various state and local offices.Norton 1942, 18The Illinois State Archives Building was designed to provide scientific care for the following categories of records: . . . b) Noncurrent records of permanent legal and historical value, no longer needed in ordinary current state business. . . .Harris 1942, 236The noncurrent records, those seldom if ever consulted in the administration of current business, constitute a vast quantity, and for them adequate protection can be more easily provided. If records of this group have outlived their administrative usefulness and have no permanent legal or research value or are duplicated elsewhere, the thing to do is to initiate disposal proceedings to get rid of them.Harris 1942, 237More important noncurrent records ought, of course, to receive special protection. If there is sufficient reasonably safe space left in their present building after provision has been made for personnel shelter areas and for the storage of important semicurrent records, they can be placed there. This will not often be the case, however, and it will be well to plan for their evacuation, now or later.Church 1943, 145–146The fact that libraries and archival agencies must co-exist in close relationship to be useful would seem much too obvious to argue, but I think that there is a definite lack of understanding that this is so, a lack of understanding largely stemming from the fact that archivists are loath to admit the change that takes place in material in that period in which the material loses the immediate purpose for which it was created, and becomes what is usually termed a noncurrent record.Brayer 1944, 122Microfilming was an innovation which required a good deal of selling, and I am happy to say that with the approval and support of another speaker at this annual meeting, Mr. Clyffe Crandall of the Interstate Commerce Commission, we were able to institute a program by which more than twelve-million non-current accounting records of no special historical significance (but which federal regulations required us to keep for periods ranging from three to fifteen years) have been microfilmed and the original papers destroyed.Trever 1944a, 218In February, 1943, a law was passed by the State Assembly making provision for the disposal or destruction of non-current records in all departments of the state, county and city governments.Buck 1945a, 113That does not mean, however, that the archivist who takes over noncurrent records has nothing to do in order to make them readily available for use. Apart from the facts that they may be in disorder and have to be rearranged or the original indexes may have been lost, it is often the case that the use that is made of noncurrent records is very different from the use that was made of them when they were current, and as a consequence different types of finding aids are necessary.Buck 1945b, 268For example, records will not be accessioned, though non-current and of enduring value, if it is obvious that they can be kept and used to better effect in the agency that has custody of them than in the National Archives.Le Duc 1946, 132–133Along with the college historian, the officers of the college will be ready to use a well-managed archives. The extent of this service will depend, necessarily, on the degree to which official records of the college are collected. A certain progressive development may occur: as administrative and teaching personnel become aware of the archives, and use it, they will more readily surrender their non-current records for preservation.Holmes 1949, 353The backlog of non-current records of permanent value has been growing until another building the size of the National Archives in Washington might now easily be filled.Brooks 1950, 46The specific mention of “archives and historical manuscripts” in another section of the constitution underlines our basic interest in noncurrent records of enduring value, governmental or other. It is to promote that basic interest that archivists have a legitimate “concern in records administration” (to use the title of a paper I wrote in 1942, which I still believe quite valid).Ruddell 1955, 258There remain the current records, the historical records, and the inactive or noncurrent records, each requiring special and different consideration yet each to be dovetailed into a uniformly balanced and efficiently functioning program. There must be a systematic and continuing flow of records from the originating office into low-cost storage and finally to the waste-paper dealer.Davis 1959, 191Faced with inundation by what today would be classified as record-center or noncurrent records, the secretary of state in 1939 secured a revision of the 1889 act, which permitted him to receive in the Archives only records deemed by him to have historical value. The problem of storing noncurrent, nonarchival materials was covered by legislation, enacted in 1947, enabling the secretary of state to establish an out-and-out record center. This low-cost storage and service facility, where an agency can keep its less active files, is now being used by some 45 State agencies.Cappon 1959, 306Even after the non-current records of enduring value have been segregated for maintenance as archives, they will still have administrative use—the main reason for establishing an archives. (Note that records qualify as archives not primarily because they are old but because they have continuing value.)Fishbein 1970, 184The records center system has been one of the most important innovations by the National Archives and Records Service. It was reasonably assumed that the maintenance of noncurrent records would bring to light mismanagement of records and decrease losses of permanent records. But, as agencies learned of the substantial savings achieved by transferring records to centers, they transferred records that were still relatively active.Pérotin 1972, 27In short, the aim was to arrange for the files of the League to progress from the stage of noncurrent records to that of archives, properly speaking, usable for historical research.Blendon 1972, 62The archivist is charged with preserving the permanently valuable, noncurrent records of an institution.Rieger 1973, 493In this connection the report notes the growth of intermediate records centers, mainly in western countries, as an economical means of dealing with semicurrent and non-current records prior to their ultimate disposition.Evans, Harrison, and Thompson 1974, 426NONCURRENT RECORDS. Records no longer required in the conduct of current business that can therefore be accessioned by an archival repository or destroyed.Ziegler 1975, 195Noncurrent records, if of permanent or long-term value, are normally retired when requests for consultation diminish to less than six requests per annum.Core 1976, 309In agreement with the originating offices, disposal schedules are developed for the various types of records and provide for the speedy and automatic destruction of noncurrent records of ephemeral value.Blouin et al. 1977, 302Depositories have been established, primarily in colleges and universities across the state, to receive noncurrent records which need to be placed in safe environmental conditions and made available to researchers.Pinkett 1978, 415Non-current records of the U.S. Congress, including committee records, are being transferred to the National Archives Building at the close of each Congress, as prescribed by law.Lytle 1980a, 65Moreover, the archives system should include active records of government and other institutions as well as non-current records selected for archival preservation; the traditional dichotomy of retrieval provisions for current and archival records makes little sense in the modern era of records and information management.Cappon 1982, 23The most notable contribution of Americans to the discipline of archives has been the concept and development of records administration (records management preferred by the “management”) to prepare for intelligent retention and disposal of non-current records with respect to their value as archives.NASARA 1982, 455Inactive or noncurrent records should be segregated from active records and stored away from busy office areas.Joyce 1984, 132As repositories of non-current records, archives are inevitably (one is tempted to say relentlessly) historical.Evans 1990, 17Recalling that less than two decades before, that term [archives] was generally understood to mean noncurrent institutional records of continuing value, I added that archival agencies, at least according to Schellenberg, were supposed to be essentially “receiving” rather than “collecting” agencies.Bellardo and Bellardo 1992, 3Historically, the term [archives] referred more narrowly to the noncurrent records of an organization or institution preserved because of their continuing value.Kigongo-Bukenya 1993, 360In this context, archives derive from records. Archives are noncurrent records that have been formally appraised and have been judged to have continuing or permanent value as evidence for research purposes.Brown and Yakel 1996, 273Academic administrators rely on archival records for a variety of administrative, legal, financial, and historical reasons. In fact, the primary mission of many college and university archives is to manage these non-current records and make them accessible to users.Patkus 1997, 114The culture of organizations is important, and for those that choose to maintain an archives, or otherwise care for their non-current records, the particular values of the parent entity can affect archival operations in various ways.Posner 2003, 4There are two basically different definitions of the word archives. One of them limits the term to noncurrent records that, because of their long-range value, have been transferred to an ad hoc agency, called an archives, and it is in this sense that the term is used in German.O’Toole 2004a, 165It was true that the distinction between current records (“files”) and noncurrent records (“archives”) was not as sharp in the ancient world as it would become in the modern one, and therefore the history of what moderns would consider the specifically archival component of ancient recordkeeping “must remain uneven and even partly contestable.”Millar 2006b, 63Traditional archival description, an approach most often discussed in a North American context, occurs after the acquisition, appraisal, and arrangement of a body of noncurrent records, which have been removed intellectually or physically from the creating agency and placed in a separate administrative environment: an archival facility. It is possible, but not assured, that before the records moved to the archives, the creating agency created classification schemes, retention schedules, and other documents that provided information about those records for the use of officers in the agency. Once in archival custody, the records are defined in large part by their historical, evidential, or informational value.Caswell 2011, 222, fn. 54Furthermore, the word archives refers to both current and noncurrent records in many countries.Nash and Sosnowsky 2010, 154Noncurrent records are often not migrated. The longer the noncurrent (archival) records await conversion, the more difficult the process becomes.Scanlan 2011, 448Records managers might destroy information that an archivist would have preserved, and archivists complicate the records manager’s job with interest in records of historical value. To be fair, records retention schedules typically factor in historical value to some degree, but the primary goal of records managers is to eliminate noncurrent records as quickly as possible. Keeping records beyond their legally required retention results in increased costs and risks for the records creators.Cox 2011, 456Along the same lines, the potential value of even noncurrent records within our own U.S. National Archives to a foreign adversary can be illustrated simply by the number of such records that remain classified, disclosure of which would, by definition, be “reasonably expected” to cause damage to national security.
