Functional Analysis and the Reappraisal of Faculty Papers

Many repositories at American colleges and universities hold the official records of their institutions as well as the personal papers of individuals. Archivists appraise these different materials—institutional records and personal papers—using separate theoretical perspectives. They tend to bring a records-management view of evidential value to the appraisal of institutional records and a curator’s eye for informational and intrinsic values to personal manuscripts. There is one collecting category common to university repositories, however, that requires a hybrid approach. Falling between the two broad categories of university records and personal manuscripts are the papers of university faculty members. Studies of the holdings of university archives indicate that faculty papers are well represented in the archival record