LibGuides: Primary Sources: A Guide: Organizational Records

Working with Organizational Records

Organizations represent a wide range of formal groups, organized around a central purpose or mission. Under this definition, organizations include business, religious groups, activist groups, professional associations, and more. We can also think of government as a form of organization, but we deal with government and their documents separately below.

Just as organizations pursue a diverse range of activities, they also produce many different types of documents. Internal meeting minutes may reveal how an organization was administered or reached important decisions, while marketing materials and press releases aimed at the broader public illustrate how a group tried to persuade the public on an issue or in the marketplace.

When considering how to use organizational records, consider the following?

Who wrote this?
Does the mission of the organization change how we think about this document? (e.g. commercial advertising, missionary publications, civil rights activists' pamphlets)
Was this document created for the public, or was it only meant to be used privately by an individual or office?
Whose perspective is missing from this publication?

Businesses

Lehman Brothers archives
The business records highlight the administrative and financial activities of Lehman Brothers, and include board meeting minutes, company strategy, financial operations, communications material and reports, and correspondence. Office and client files detail the business practices of Lehman Brothers and Kuhn, Loeb & Co. The bulk of the material dates from the 1960s to the 2000s. Also includes over 900 deal books, from 1925-1986.
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Digital archives provided by the Baker Library and Bloomberg Center of the Harvard University Business School.

Political and Social Organizations

Missionaries & Religious Groups

International Mission Photography Archive (IMPA)
Offers historical images from Protestant and Catholic missionary collections in Britain, Norway, Germany, France, Switzerland, and the United States. The photographs, which range in time from the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century, offer a visual record of missionary activities and experiences in Africa, China, Madagascar, India, Papua-New Guinea, and the Caribbean

Professional Associations

American Medical Association (AMA) Archives
Digital access to Proceedings of the House of Delegates and other materials from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Great for tracking historical debates and concerns of the medical profession.