n.the responsible management of archival resourcesGingerich 1966b, 130Adequate records storage involves protection from theft, from fire, and from damage from light, heat, moisture, vermin, etc. It also requires the filing of the records in such a way that they be available when they are needed. These services are specialized services not available in the ordinary home and usually not in our institutional offices. Mennonite General Conference has established the Archives of the Mennonite Church for these very reasons. The sense of stewardship of records demands it.Caswell 2013, 520In contrast to custodianship, stewardship deems the physical and legal transfer of records as the first step in an ongoing relationship between archival repositories and stakeholders.Daniels et al. 2015, 255Numerous donors have been concerned about the handling, use, and reproduction of their collection materials, as well as how researchers will access them. We mitigated these concerns extensively explaining archival stewardship, reference room procedures, and reproduction policies.Hagenmaier and Kirk 2015, 27The instructions will ask them to inventory the files, identify organization methods (or lack thereof), think about files that might be important to preserve, look for sensitive information and preservation problems, and consider how they would manage the files for better long-term stewardship.Lavoie and Malpas 2015, 10For the purposes of this paper, stewardship is taken to mean a collection of processes that systematically collect, organize, make available, and preserve information resources.Roy and Trace 2018, 20For museum and archives personnel, the interim answer to envisioning their work with the tribal communities has been to define their work as stewardship. Stewardship brings with it the connotation that a steward is acting as a surrogate for another in the process. Stewardship not only describes one role for personnel in those cultural heritage institutions but it also promotes a set of attitudes: The two key elements of the stewardship concept are the ability to care for, manage, or control persons or things and accountability for the proper exercise of that ability. A steward exercises power and authority but does not have license to do so in a self-serving or careless manner.
Notes
Stewardship often implies the management of archival resources as a surrogate for another party such as the records creators. Some writers have pointed to not only the sense of responsibility but also of power and authority that derives from the role of steward.
