Examining historical photographs can open paths to improved understanding of the history of most disciplines, including medicine. Images can be "read" and advantageously integrated with other historical "traces." Documents, including photographs, are "orphaned" when separated from their creators and used out of context. Archivists share with historians the responsibility for considering interpretations of the documentary record. Cultivating subject-specific understanding as well as general historical awareness expands our competency to read photographs and promotes more contextualized and historically grounded uses of information.

Many archival collections contain significant quantities of material related to postage stamps and postal history. Many philatelists are interested in researching them. This paper reviews some of the issues surrounding the disposition of philatelic materials and provides guidance for archivists in appraising, preserving, and describing them.

Owning Memory: How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History ¹ presents the concept of a "community of records" as it applies to native Virgin Islanders. A "community of records" refers both to how records are (re-)created or reused within a community as well as its contextualization of records (through memory and narrative construction). This paper examines whether this intellectual construct and lens can be applied to other social groups and their relationships to records. Specifically, this article explores the connections between genealogists and records—how genealogists reuse, combine, interpret, and disseminate records to create a coherent narrative of their families' lives that gives added meaning to their own lives.

Recent developments in the field of K-12 (kindergarten through twelfth grade) education have made archival resources essential tools for many teachers. Inquiry-based learning, document-based questions, and high stakes standardized testing have converged to make primary resources an important teaching tool in elementary and secondary education. Teaching and testing K-12 students require analysis of primary documents, so that archival records take their place alongside the test tube and the textbook in many American classrooms. These trends represent an opportunity for archives to expand their patron base, establish contacts in the community, contribute to the vitality of public education in their communities, and cultivate the next generation of archives' users, donors, and supporters. This paper encourages archivists to consider K-12 students and their teachers when planning programs, digital products, and services.

This article grounds the development of labor archives in the context of the archival profession. For the first half of the twentieth century, modest efforts to collect labor records were firmly rooted in the historical manuscripts tradition. By the 1960s, the flourishing public archives programs and the emergence of the new social history spurred a boom in labor archives. This boom ended in the 1980s, as unions faced tougher times and many institutions cut their support for archives programs. Today, the survival of labor archives programs depends on archivists forging a closer relationship with the labor movement, especially by establishing records- and knowledge-management partnerships. But first they must prove their worth to the labor movement. This process begins by examining the history, theory, and practice of the discipline.

This article describes the planning, funding, methodology, and impact of a comprehensive survey of the physical condition and preservation needs of manuscript collections in the Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC) unit of the Washington State University Libraries. MASC librarians and management determined that these collections, as well as MASC's historical photograph collections, should be systematically surveyed and assessed, so that a prioritized preservation treatment plan could be developed. MASC librarians designed and executed two separate surveys, one for photograph collections and one for manuscripts. The manuscript portion of the survey project, which supported the development of a comprehensive preservation treatment plan for processed manuscript collections, is the subject of this article.