n.a space used to store items of continuing value, particularly records; a storehouse Gracy 1973a, 21Museums collect for display. Archivists, on the other hand, preserve for informational content of enduring value, must process their materials painstakingly by record group, keeping collections together in order to make them readily usable, and assist every patron to utilize the repository as thoroughly as possible.Wolff 1981, 348They may feel that the documentation of a discipline takes precedence over the documentation of an institution, and that scholars are better served when papers, including faculty papers, on a given subject are gathered in one repository.Quinn 1982, 19However, records and papers of a value comparable to those initially accessioned may be rejected as the repository matures and its shelves become crowded. Appraisal criteria are never static.Engst 1985, 44The members of the group agreed on the significance of veterans’ records. One member stated, “We should collect anything and everything on the war.” The need for a permanent repository was affirmed.Cross 1992, 36The Thurmond Collection at Clemson University is similar to these multi-part beasts in its dual role as both a records center and an archival repository for the records of an active member congress.Michelson and Rothenberg 1992, 267England’s Oxford Text Archive (OTA) is a large repository of machine-readable text and includes text bases in more than twenty-five languages. Recently it served as a key source for a dissertation on Jane Austen’s novels.Grabowski 1992, 466(For most people, for instance, presidential libraries are not repositories but museums crammed with wax dummies, football helmets, and the gifts of foreign heads of state.)Cain 1993, 42–43The handling and housing of materials in arrangement and description, even when specific, detailed preservation work is not undertaken, can either promote or hinder further survival once the material is safely in a repository.NSLA 2001Depending on how the term is used, a repository may be directly accessible to users or may be a place from which specific databases, files, or documents are obtained for further relocation or distribution in a network. A repository may be just the aggregation of data itself into some accessible place of storage or it may also imply some ability to selectively extract data. Related terms are data warehouse and data mining.Jimerson 2005b, 236Belknap and his heirs, both manuscript curators and archivists, sought first to preserve and protect the original documents by establishing secure repositories with increasingly sophisticated methods for protection and conservation of endangered primary sources.Hoorens et al. 2007, 12In such cases, limited user-based or role-based administrative access may be granted; in other cases, selected users may be granted access to selected materials in an archive under restricted conditions (for example, on library premises). In such cases a repository may be referred to as a ‘dim’ archive. Conversely, repositories that provide full access are referred to as ‘light’ or ‘open’ archives.Enwezor 2008, 11The standard view of the archive oftentimes evokes a dim, musty place full of drawers, filing cabinets, and shelves laden with old documents, an inert repository of historical artifacts against the archive as an active, regulatory system. It is this latter formulation of the archive that has engaged the attention of so many contemporary artists in recent years.Clarke 2009, 190Preservation begins at the repository level not only in terms of policy but also in terms of physical storage, as the ability to provide proper environmental control is the most fundamental consideration of collection preservation.Monks-Leeson 2011, 39Internet archives, as opposed to the online content of archival repositories, are created by institutions, scholarly communities, historical societies, and individuals for a number of reasons: they bring together large and dispersed collections of material; they offer thematic access to scholarly (and, often, nonscholarly) resources; and they promote certain ideas and viewpoints through the marshaling and visibility of documents, photographs, and other digital surrogates.Galloway 2011, 178Because of my interest in exposing students to real digital materials (many under threat of obsolescence) that needed to be archived and thereby secured, the focus has been on the first steps in the archiving process, i.e., the capture into a secure repository of authentic digital objects that are adequately described.O’Neal 2015, 5Up until the mid-twentieth century, many tribal communities produced few written records. Second, due to the United States’ colonization of Native Americans resulting in broken treaties and termination, hundreds of non-Native repositories, including universities, historical societies, and federal agencies in the United States, hold much of the physical archival collections that document Native American history and lifeways in far-removed repositories outside of tribal communities.Wiseman and Matthews 2016, 43The OAIS Reference Model, developed by the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems, provides a functional framework for what is required in a repository to preserve and provide access to digital content over the long term.an institution focused on the care and storage of items of continuing value, particularly recordsStewart 1976, 4A repository may acquire individual manuscripts, but more commonly it seeks collections, bodies of unpublished materials which originate from a common source or have a common theme or format.Brichford 1977, 19The repository must provide the financial support required for supporting secondary resources and the salaries, space, and equipment to obtain, process, service, and house new collections.Weldon 1977, 297War intruded and the professions drifted apart. In 1947 the AHA Subcommittee on Public Archives was abolished, and by 1950 all AHA committees on archival materials were gone. Only recently has there been restoration of formal liaison to explore matters of mutual concern, most often charges by historians that their access to needed materials is being impaired by the policies or practices of some repository.Naugler 1978, 176Although not the first national repository to establish such a programme—its counterparts in the United States and Sweden having already done so—the PAC was the first archival repository in Canada to tackle machine readable records.Burckel 1987, 433The Rockefeller Archive Center was established in 1974 as the research repository for the archives of the Rockefeller University, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Rockefeller family, related nonprofit organizations, and persons associated with their endeavors.Cox 1988, 3A not uncommon approach is a sort of paralyzing discouragement that causes the archivist to leave the repository or to focus inwardly on other important functions that can be accomplished without significant new infusions of monies.Meissner 1990, 39But the truth is that when a large corporation donates a large body of records to an outside repository it establishes a long-term relationship with that institution, a relationship fraught with implications for both the corporation and the repository that may not be immediately apparent.Ham 1993, 46Before making a major expenditure—likely one involving several thousand dollars in an already inflated market—the repository should get an independent appraisal of the collection’s monetary value, particularly if its archivists are unfamiliar with the market.Ericson and Ranger 1999, 93If interpreted strictly, the RLG guidelines are seemingly of very limited use to many of the institutions for which they profess to be written, namely archives and manuscript repositories whose materials, by their very nature, fit these characteristics.Greene 2002, 36The presence of materials in a repository that have not been consciously identified as inappropriate and the lack of a clear collection policy may increase the likelihood of a repository’s accepting more materials having a similar lack of purpose.Wurl 2005, 72Material may be gifted to a repository but with the expectation that in many respects, the relationship between donor and archive is just beginning.Stanford and Meyer 2011, 2In both circumstances, the volunteers were members or officers of the donor organizations, who approached the repositories with the request to assist in managing the collections of their associations.Yeo 2012, 54But it is not only family members who add, remove, or rearrange items. In my survey, I discovered seven instances in which extraneous items appeared to have been inserted into the papers of an individual by later custodians who were not family members and (more worryingly) two instances in which such items had been inserted by the repository where the papers were held.Miller 2013, 522A couple of years ago a colleague asked, “What have you stopped doing?” It was a provocative question posited in light of the seemingly ever-increasing demands for repositories to do more as resources grow tighter.
Notes
The term repository1 can refer to any storehouse holding any type of material. Archivists generally use the term to refer to storage venues holding paper or digital records, and even both. The term, however, can be used for storage areas that hold nothing but books or museum artifacts, though for archivists this term is employed to cover whatever cultural materials held by an archives. A repository2 is the organization that runs the physical or digital repository, although it is occasionally impossible to separate one sense of the word from another in a sentence.
