The Paper Chase Ends Here
By Llana Drucker and Joseph Bedford
You are a corporate communicator. A member of the press calls requesting a photograph of your organization’s founder. Your boss e-mails you; he is trying to find the original press release that unveiled a revolutionary new company product. Or you’ve just been asked to sit on the 50th anniversary committee; they need your help in locating visual images, documents and artifacts for use in anniversary-related projects and marketing programs.
Do you know where to find these types of historical materials? If your company or organization already maintains archives, good for you, though you may not be utilizing its full potential. If your organization is like most, however, its historical materials are lost in an impossible paper chase stuffed in file cabinets, tucked away in drawers, or scattered between the library, personal collections and various departments and offices.
This paper chase can end now. You can organize all of your pertinent historical materials into a comprehensive archival storage and management system. In the process, you’ll get rid of all those boxes, loose papers and old materials that are just taking up space. More important, you’ll gain a truly valuable business resource. Think of it as spring cleaning for the new millennium.
The creation of archives will benefit your organization in a number of ways. First, it will provide the opportunity to review the masses of material that have accumulated over the years and discard what is no longer necessary or historically significant. Second, it will process and preserve the materials that are important, ensuring a permanent historical record of your organization. Creating archives will also consolidate your materials into a computerized database that allows people to easily search, locate and utilize its contents. Once you have organized your archives, you can put it to work. The material now housed in your company’s archives has value; it can support a variety of applications and help you do you job as a corporate communicator. In a well organized archives, photos are easily accessed for use in advertising and marketing campaigns; old journals, newsletters, press releases or correspondence are grouped together by subject and date making research requests for these types of materials a piece of cake. Historical ads and artifacts provide unique visuals for annual report covers, orientation and training materials or other corporate publications. And legal and financial documents are readily available for consultation and review. Whatever the specific need, having an archives just makes filling it a simpler and often times more creative process.
So how does one get started? The first step is to assess an organization’s historical resources and determine the scope of the archive project. Next, materials are processed, with insignificant materials discarded and those deemed “archival” arranged with like materials for cataloguing. (If necessary, historic preservation efforts are undertaken for specific items.) The materials are then stored in proper archival folders, boxes or containers, and assigned an identification system and/or number. Finally, the materials are catalogued and descriptive information is entered into a computerized database.
These are some general guidelines for creating archives, but each collection is a little different. The most important point to remember when creating archives is that its arrangement must be tailored to meet the needs of your individual organization.
Llana Drucker and Joseph Bedford are principals of History Productions, Inc., a corporate communications consulting firm, which specializes in the creation and management of corporate archives.
From The Northcoaster, IABC/Cleveland’s chapter newsletter.
