Research occupies a central place in any graduate program and needs to be integrated across the archival curriculum, from the earliest courses through completion of the degree. This article traces the origins and development of New York University's Program in Archival Management and Historical Editing in order to explore its changing conceptualizations of research, and to examine the ways in which all archival educators can strengthen this programmatic component. As one of the oldest and most successful graduate training programs in North America, NYU's history-based curriculum provides an important case study and offers some significant lessons for archival educators.
The American Bible Society's founders conceived the organization in 1816 as a traditional missionary moral reform agency. By the mid-nineteenth century, the ABS more closely resembled a modern national nonprofit corporate bureaucracy. Important changes in institutional recordkeeping accompanied and reinforced this change in mission. Increasingly, ABS field agents and employees were discouraged from presenting rich narrative reports, and were required to quantify their work into narrow statistical compilations. Recordkeeping case studies, sensitive to the broader process of institutionalization, can contribute to bureaucratization theory, expose institutional power relationships, and help archivists better appraise the informational value and limitations of their collections.
In 1987, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission funded a two-year project designed to improve religious archives in the New York metropolitan area. The Archivists of Religious Institutions, a regional group responsible for administering the grant, developed a coordinated program of workshops, consultation reports, and cooperative endeavors in order to address the peculiar problems of smaller repositories. The results illustrate the difficulties of interinstitutional cooperation, weaknesses in traditional archival training methods, and the profession's failure to address realistically the nature, role, importance, and uniqueness of smaller archives.
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