The origins of documentation strategies in context: Recollections and reflections

Abstract

The author re-examines, after twenty-five years, the influences on his ideas in the initial development of documentation strategies, reviewing in detail his preparation for the 1984 SAA program session at which documentation strategies were first presented. He explores the links between these ideas and several of his roles during that period, particularly as first director of the Historical Records Program at NHPRC from 1975 to 1981, as chair of the 1982 SAA Program Committee, and in the creation of the first Task Force, and then the Committee, on Goals and Priorities for the Archival Profession. He identifies four core approaches to assessment, planning, and advocacy for the profession that he drew from his experience, and he argues that his conceptual model and related proposals for documentation strategies flowed logically from these core approaches, which have much broader application. The author speculates that re-examining the origins of documentation strategies, and the period in which these ideas were developed, may suggest to the archives profession that it should refocus more directly and vigorously on the larger issue of archival conditions in the United States and on how to advocate directly with particular parties essential to addressing them.