Deciding what to collect

Whether working in institutional archives or manuscript collecting repositories, archivists must consciously decide what to collect and preserve. Collecting policies for acquisition of manuscripts and archives are based on the institution’s mission and goals. The process involves donor relations, legal and fiscal concerns, and accurate recordkeeping. Archives cannot save everything. Once considered an almost routine process, defining an institutional collecting policy for manuscripts and archives has recently been challenged by postmodernists who contend that the decision of what to collect is not neutral or objective, but a mediated construct based on cultural values.