Organizations that downplay their history and traditions risk losing their values, need for vision and purpose, and competence.
Leading with a sense of history is not to be enslaved to the past, but rather to acknowledge its power.
Business History
The history of a business is a key to its identity, and the memory of its strategic path helps to focus its identity better. Knowledge of the corporation deepens with an awareness of the twists and turns that have brought it to its current situation. History also helps us understand how the company’s culture has developed through its path, created as a result of choices made over time.
Corporate history is especially pertinent during transition periods, such as when founders step down from leading the company and long-term employees retire. An organization is at an inflection point where the old guard is starting to move on, and people who are left have no sense of the company’s history. Appreciating an organization’s history helps explain its culture and makes it strong and sustainable.
Morale Booster
The history of a business is a source of creativity because awareness of choices undertaken in the past may generate innovative ideas, either through further development of previous ideas or, more simply, by recovering ideas that were discarded in the past. In addition, seeing how a particular problem was solved in the past may facilitate the development of processes to solve current issues.
Having a sense of corporate history available also provides energy and trust for those making decisions. Accessing the past in the present helps put the present in context. It contributes to understanding the relativity of what seems now exceptional and complex. In the past, problems considered particularly challenging and unique put current issues into perspective.
History is useful as a diagnostic tool and a method to recall significant moments from the past to motivate employees in the present. Corporate history contains its heritage and traditions, which senior managers need to understand if they see the present as part of a process rather than a collection of accidental happenings. In addition, perceiving a company in this way can enhance the leadership team’s ability to plan.
A Culture of Collaboration
Collaboration leads to better project outcomes, the more efficient delivery of schemes, improved business performance, and greater client satisfaction. In addition, collaboration creates a culture that drives innovation and solutions to unexpected challenges during every project. As a result, collaboration has a significant impact on success.
Thriving businesses have instilled the following within their organizational culture:
Providing clear, consistent leadership and expecting the same from interested stakeholders.
Allocating collective responsibility, risk, and reward to all those involved in a project to drive a collaborative culture.
Avoiding ambiguity which undermines collaboration. Roles and responsibilities must be defined, software standardized to aid communication, and procedures for tackling problems and resolving conflicts in place.
Embracing technology to improve collaboration. Capitalizing on opportunities requires courage, as new technologies are untested, and public procurement often favors low-risk behavior and tried-and-tested approaches.
Teams work collaboratively. They believe in employee involvement and input from key stakeholders. At the outset, successful businesses lay the foundations of collaboration by estimating procures to facilitate effective communication and timely issue resolution. By promoting mutual respect and trust, early stakeholder involvement, consensus building, and leadership, organizations successfully achieve their goals and maximize quality while maintaining the budget and schedule.
History as Power
Researchers emphasize that some businesses have access to a particular portfolio of resources and capabilities, from which are derived certain behaviors and opportunities. Such resources and outcomes include extensive social capital, focus on non-financial objectives, long-term orientation, high levels of employee care, high wages, strong employee motivation, and elevated levels of organizational trust. These attributes allow organizations to survive and thrive in the most challenging economic times.
The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog.
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Archives often operate in environments defined by scarcity of space, staff, time, and funding. In these conditions, every decision carries weight. Without a plan, archives risk spreading their resources too thin, responding only to immediate crises, and missing opportunities for growth and impact. Strategic planning serves as a lifeline, providing archivists with a structured approach to prioritize, allocate resources, and communicate the value of their work to stakeholders.
Archivists have long recognized patterns of limited funding that shape their institutions, yet they have consistently responded with creativity, commitment, and innovation. Even when resources are scarce, archives continue to find ways to build and maintain essential infrastructure and strengthen public engagement. Each challenge underscores the importance of archivists’ labor and provides an opportunity to advocate for the central role archives play in their communities.
Archives safeguard treasures, including objects like the founding documents of a nation and photographs of defining cultural moments. These holdings inspire a sense of connection to the past, and at the heart of that work are archivists whose expertise brings these collections to life.
No archives is an island. Especially in resource-constrained environments, collaboration through shared infrastructure provides a lifeline. Consortia models turn scarcity into opportunity by spreading costs and expertise across multiple archives. By pooling resources, institutions achieve more than they could alone.
Well-resourced institutions have developed archival best practices, including comprehensive finding aids, climate-controlled storage, and digital preservation systems. For small or resource-constrained archives, these standards can feel out of reach. The danger is that the profession’s ideals may discourage institutions from taking action, leaving records vulnerable. The solution lies in paring down practices and procedures without abandoning principles.
Many archives exist within environments of chronic underfunding. Community archives, small historical societies, or lone arrangers may work with little more than donated materials, a handful of volunteers, and minimal budgets.
However, these institutions remain vital, safeguarding the histories of communities often absent from mainstream narratives. Scarcity shapes their reality, yet it can still allow meaningful work.
Humanity produces more digital content than at any other point in history. Every click, message, and post contributes to an expanding universe of data that represents the cultural memory of our time. At the center of this transformation stand archivists, the professionals uniquely trained to ensure that memories survive in the future. However, even as the scale of the challenge grows, their voices risk being sidelined in public conversations about digital preservation.
In recent years, the concept of “slow librarianship” has emerged as a thoughtful response to the accelerating pace and pressures placed upon library professionals. Drawing inspiration from the broader slow movement, it emphasizes care, reflection, ethics, and people-centered work over speed and efficiency.
The archival profession is characterized by dedication to public memory, cultural preservation, and service. However, beneath this noble mission lies a troubling reality: the increasing reliance on gig and contract labor.
Written documents have long occupied a privileged position in archives as the most authoritative memory source. However, this excludes vast repositories of knowledge that reside outside the written word, especially within Indigenous communities, where memory is often preserved and transmitted through oral traditions, performance, storytelling, ceremony, and embodied practices.
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In recent decades, Indigenous communities and archivists have challenged the dominant frameworks that have long shaped archival practice. Traditionally, Western archival models have prioritized state authority, institutional control, and the presumption of neutrality. These models often fail to reflect Indigenous worldviews, community needs, or the rights of Indigenous peoples over their records and heritage.
As archival practice shifts to meet the challenges of the digital age, the ethical use of born-digital materials has become one of the most pressing concerns for archivists. These materials—emails, websites, text messages, digital photographs, spreadsheets, social media posts, and more—are created and stored digitally from their inception.
The fundamental principles of archival preservation focus on the agents of deterioration, preventive conservation, and essential preservation strategies applied in archival settings.
The monetary appraisal of archives and manuscripts is a critical yet underexplored intersection of library science and financial valuation. This article addresses the persistent knowledge gap between archival assessment and fiscal valuation and provides an overview of the monetary appraisal process in the United States. It focuses on concluding the fair market value (FMV) of noncash charitable contributions, a process governed by Internal Revenue Service (IRS) regulations and the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (USPAP). By documenting practices and terminology, the article serves as a resource for archivists navigating the complexities of donor relations and institutional stewardship. It advocates for increased fiscal literacy within the archival profession, suggesting that an integrated understanding of market dynamics and stewardship costs is essential for the care and financial substantiation of collections.
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Description is a cornerstone of archival practice, providing the means for users and archivists to understand, access, and interpret materials.
Mixed-media archives, which contain physical and digital records, present unique challenges for archival arrangement. These collections require archivists to develop strategies that address the different needs of physical and digital materials while maintaining the collection’s coherence and accessibility.
Digital records have introduced new challenges to traditional archival arrangement practices. While the principles of original order and provenance remain relevant, the nature of digital materials requires archivists to adapt these principles to new formats and technologies.
Archival arrangement organizes and structures archival materials to ensure efficient management, access, and preservation.
Redaction in archival work—obscuring or removing sensitive information from records—has become a central concern in contemporary archival ethics. As archives increasingly acquire born-digital records and digitize historical collections for online access, archivists must grapple with data privacy, access, transparency, and potential harm.
Archives have traditionally focused on preserving historical records, ensuring access, and maintaining the integrity of collections. However, in the digital age, the moral responsibilities of archivists have grown more complex.
Archives have long been viewed as bastions of memory, preservation, and historical accountability. However, archivists must confront ethical questions in an era of digital surveillance, data harvesting, and global information flows.
As archival institutions evolve from custodians of information to facilitators of memory and meaning-making, emotional engagement has become a vital, though often overlooked, dimension of archival design.
Archival reading rooms have long been the centerpiece of public access to collections. They are where researchers engage with historical documents, where discovery becomes tangible, and where the institutional identity of an archives is most visibly embodied.
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Design thinking has become a widely adopted approach in fields ranging from technology to education, prized for emphasizing empathy, experimentation, and iterative problem-solving. For archives, traditionally shaped around internal workflows and professional conventions, design thinking presents an opportunity to reimagine outreach and engagement strategies from users’ perspectives.
With shrinking resources and increasing demands, archivists cannot afford to view budgeting as an afterthought. A carefully developed budget is a strategic tool that connects an archives’ mission to its daily operations. It demonstrates accountability, supports advocacy efforts, and provides a framework for decision-making.