Archival responsibilities of university libraries

university library in the collection and preservation of archival resources, alongside the county record office and other respositories of public records. It argues that the university library’s activity in this field is justified both by the dependence of university scholarship and research on archival sources and by the breadth of expertise available in universities for the library’s bandling, processing and exploitation of archives as research resources. A university’s manuscripts and archives collections should be closely related to the research and teaching interests of the university; and its collections of books, etc., constitute an important record and archive in themselves of the history of the university. The contribution of libraries to archives is a very ancient one, going back many hundreds of years before &dquo;archives&dquo;, in its present institutional sense as public, county or local record offices, had been created. It has been pointed out that the coming of print led to the division in libraries and archives which we now recognize. Paradoxically, the departments of manuscripts in libraries today, which seem to cut so sharply across the activities and interests of archives, are the natural heirs of and successors to the earliest tradition before any such division existed