The state archives or historical societies in many public land states hold a group of federal records that document the disposing of the federal domain, the records of the local land district offices of the U.S. General Land Office. This article traces the custodial history of land district records for the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota from their creation in the nineteenth century to their availability and use today. Changes in federal records-disposal practices and varying responses by archivists and historical agencies produced very different results in the six states, particularly between the three states whose land offices closed in 1877 and the three that closed in 1925.

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.

This article describes a legal challenge which tested the right of the donor of a collection of private papers and the State Historical Society of Wisconsin to control access to that collection. It analyzes the arguments used by both sides in the case, the implications of the court's decision for future litigation of a similar nature, and the potential impact on the ability of archives to collect politically sensitive material.

Documentation strategy has emerged as one of the major new archival concepts of the 1980s. The emergence of interest in it is a healthy sign for the archival profession's quest to identify, select, and preserve records of enduring value. Yet, the documentation strategy is still a largely untested concept. This essay describes the strategy's application in documenting geographical localities, in this case western New York, and, as a result, poses a number of additional questions about the documentation strategy that still need answering.

The primary purpose of an institutional archives is the management of the records of a parent organization. The archivist is likely to work in isolation from other archivists and, unlike a historical society or library-based employee, cannot expect preservation of historical records to be defined as an institutional priority. Thus the roles of the archivist and the archives must be well-defined if the archivist is to function as an advocate for the archives and an educator for the institution's staff. The author emphasizes the importance of developing long-term goals that go beyond ensuring the mere survival of the institution's records.

Archivists and researchers must be aware of the limitations of records found in a single repository and should know what complementary materials exist in other archives. The United Nations War Crimes Commission records at the United Nations Archives provides an extreme example of the dangers inherent in relying on only one institution's records. The author describes the UNWCC archives, discusses the policy governing access and use, and analyzes the problems of taking the content of the records at face value.

Soviet archivists and researchers are looking to a new spirit of historical awareness to penetrate and transform the functions and mandates of archival service. One manifestation of the new openness in Soviet society is the discussion and open criticism of the existing archival system that has been appearing in the Soviet press. The author traces that discussion and draws on extensive experience with Soviet archives to describe access, appraisal, and description policies and practices. If trends toward more glasnost' continue in Soviet society and its historical scholarship, they will require that the current discussion and criticism lead to fundamental restructuring of archival policies and practices.