Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Burns Like Dust: 1 House, 8 Collections, 7 Repositories, Ruth E. Bryan

Library Presentations

This case study is about collection development policies, both on the repository level as well as applying them within individual collections, specifically faculty papers. "Dust" is a metaphor for both the on-the-ground experience of archival appraisal as well as for the “dust” of people’s lives and events that historians are “breathing in” when they work with primary source material (Carol Steedman, Dust: The archive and cultural history, 2002). From the perspective of the cultural value of archives, this “dust” is what we select when we’re transforming a mountain of paper or electronic records into archives.