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by Claudette John
The word "dialogue" may be defined as an exchange of ideas and opinions, and that is exactly what I have in mind for what, with your help, will be a regular feature of this newsletter. Business archivists are a small segment of a relatively small profession. Although our records and responsibilities may vary a great deal, we have many problems, let¨s call them challenges, in common. We have shared approaches to meeting these challenges in a number of informal ways. I think the time has come to establish a more structured mechanism for sharing information and ideas. The editor and I invite you to participate in "Dialogue."
A major challenge for many archivists in large businesses is meaningful interface with records managers. The large insurance and financial services company, for which I am a corporate archivist, distributes its records management functions, making each operating group and corporate staff division responsible for its own records policy and procedures. I suspect that many of us are faced with this "challenge" of no one person or department with which to interface. I have developed some alternatives that have worked for us. I¨ll list a few after a quick review of starting points that are almost universally applicable, even if you are the records manager.
Begin by locating the records that are generally recognized as historical, and may be identified that way. Review retention schedules if you can gain access to them, and survey inactive records. Identify string savers and follow those leads. You have now come to the point where you need to establish an ongoing working relationship with the records manager. Suppose, for any one of a variety of reasons, you cannot develop a rapport with the records management? What can you do? Keep trying and meanwhile:
Always ask for a tour of the vault. In many cases it holds more than negotiable paper; it may contain old founding documents, minutes, architectural drawings, letter books, etc., that even the custodian of the material has forgotten about. We have been successful twice in two tries, not a bad average.
Get on every distribution list. This may seem to be dangerous advice, but you don¨t want to miss anything, and you can always ask to be dropped from a mailing list. The difficulty may be locating people in charge of the various lists. I solved this problem in the case of marketing distributions by taking a Hollinger box, identifying it with cutouts from our outdated archives brochure, and placing it in the department on the desk where the mailings are prepared. One of each goes into that box. When it is full, the contents are sent to us, and the process begins again. Very simple, but it works.
Contact retiring chief executives and operating officers as well as selected retiring employees. Offer to appraise their papers for the archives. You will certainly find some material worth keeping. You may also discover a retired employee who is an excellent source of information and can fill in gaps.
Contact the communications department(s) and offer to be the repository of record for all in-house publications.
Offer records consulting services on a project basis. One project may be large enough to warrant preparing a special project budget, while the next may be a relatively straightforward survey which leads to scheduling records for destruction, storage, or transfer to the corporate archives. Part of any recommendation for transfer to the archives should be a provision for continuing automatic transfer of those series in cases where it is applicable. As your archives gains a reputation for dependability and prompt reference service, other departments will seek you out. The advantages of this project approach and other survey methods are at least threefold: You take the initiative. You appraise the records in the office of origin. You have the opportunity to accession complete series of records, often before the department personnel have weeded them. In many areas this is a godsend, almost worth wading through garbage in others.
When you get a request for information or documents not in the archives, records that according to your policy statement should be part of your archives, try to locate them for your researcher (and yourself). We acquired the records of our international business, which spanned a century, in just that way.
Seek the records of acquired companies and subsidiaries where it is possible to do so. It is often prudent from management¨s point of view as well as important for historical purposes to save the records of a purchased or merged subsidiary. Materials such as cancelled stock certificates and product records may be needed by the parent company in case of litigation. It is important that these records be available in the archives if there is no records manager with corporate-wide jurisdiction.
I hope this list will stimulate some useful thinking, but my real purpose is to start a discussion. Join the dialogue. Take issue with me, ask questions, or start a new dialogue on a new topic. Among the issues that I would like to see in future columns are oral history in business archives, restricting access to records, tailoring traditional archival services to a business environment (or justifying your existence in a profit-making institution), and practical approaches to automating finding aids. Please address your questions to me, Claudette John, CIGNA Archives, 1600 Arch St., Philadelphia, PA 19103, or to the editor of this newsletter.
WHERE HAVE THE BALDWIN PAPERS GONE?
by Henry A. Rentschler, President, Baldwin-Hamilton
" Where have the Baldwin papers gone?" I can shed some light on this question, but first a little history. Baldwin-Lima-Hamilton (B-L-H) was a complex company. Its roots went back to the very beginnings of industry in the United States. Baldwin had its beginnings in 1832; Hamilton in 1846; and Lima in 1869. Baldwin, Lima, and Hamilton merged in 1950. Much of the corporate and product history has been published, some quite recently. I have had the privilege of helping on some of the recent volumes, including one on Lima that is due out later this year.
At the time B-L-H discontinued the manufacture of locomotives in 1954, the firm had attempted to destroy most of its old and obsolete records. It only partially succeeded, and fortunately some drawings were spirited off and preserved. A curator at the Smithsonian Institution told me some years ago that the Baldwin collection alone, if it were still intact, would be valued at over $7,000,000. Too bad it was so scattered, and so much destroyed.
I will not reconstruct B-L-H¨s entire history here, nor can I comment much on the "corporate" records, which were mostly destroyed, or in a few cases ended up with Armour and Greyhound during the litigation of B-L-H in 1971-72. Our group, now known as the Baldwin-Hamilton Company, a division of Ecolaire Incorporated, ended up with certain engineering records patents, files, and tooling directly related to our product lines. Due to the similarity of our company name and that of B-L-H, we often get inquiries about this product or that, and I keep a list of other B-L-H product lines to help the owners of B-L-H apparatus find information. The list contains trade names of products and locations of recordsòeighteen locations, eighteen other companies with B-L-H records.
During a major consolidation in 1975-76 we gave away many original documents and drawings to museums around the country. Among the gifts were: documents pertaining to the Austin-Western and Western dump cars, given to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga manuals for steam and diesel locomotives with Baldwin and Hamilton trade names, given to the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento; Baldwin locomotive manuals and other engineering records, given to the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden; Baldwin, Southwark, Hamilton, and Hooven, Owens, Rentschler trade catalogues, given to the Hagley Museum, Wilmington, Delaware; records of Hamilton, Baldwin, De La Vergne, Lima-Hamilton, and Hooven, Owens, Rentschler machinery given to the Ohio Historical Society, Columbus; a large collection of locomotive drawings and records of Baldwin, Baldwin Locomotive Works, and BòLòH, given to the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania, Strasburg; Southwark, PorteròAllen, Baldwin, and De La Vergne records pertaining to steam engines, pumping engines, blowing engines, diesel engines, refrigeration machines, and locomotives, given to the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington; Hamilton, Pelton, Southwark, De La Vergne, and Hooven, Owens, Rentschler records pertaining to diesel and steam engines and other equipment, given to the Steamship Historical Society, New York records of AustinòWestern dump cars and Baldwin locomotives, given to the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum, Chattanooga; records of Baldwin, De La Vergne, GriscomòRussell, Griscomò Spencer, and LoewyòHydropress, given to the Western Museum of Mining and Industry, Colorado Springs, CO.
Additionally, the largest collection of Baldwin Locomotive Works drawings and records, and records of BòLòH, is at the DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas; the DeGolyer acquired the collection in 1954. Approximately 15,000 BòLòH and Baldwin Locomotive Works photographs and negatives, including the earliest glass plate negatives, are owned by H. L. Broadbelt of Newport News, VA. And many Lima photographs, drawings, and corporate records are at the Allen County Historical Society in Lima, OH.
Of course, we retain modern (mostly post World War II) records pertaining to our current product linesòlocomotives, diesel engines, steam engines, and dump carsòand current trade namesòBaldwin, Hamilton, LimaòHamilton, Whitcomb, AustinòWestern, and Hooven, Owens, Rentschler. Finally, it is not "paper," but I might add that we have preserved the 1905 statue of Matthias Baldwin, which we display outside our offices here in Malvern, PA.
Where have the Baldwin papers gone? Almost everywhere apparently.
