Introduction

As archivists, you will care for and maintain collections of materials with invaluable amounts of cultural knowledge and importance. Especially within a community context, archives may possess a political or elevated role in upholding and safekeeping historical changes, insights, and language itself.

Depending on how established your archive is, there may be a lot of materials stored and catalogued within it or in some cases, not. If you are just starting out and building your inventory, this article is for you and discusses how to go about potentially acquiring and accepting new entries to your archive.

What is Acquisition?

The process in which archives build their inventory is called acquisition. Acquisition relates to the obtaining and receiving of new materials. It is then followed typically by a process called appraisal, which relates to assessing contents, their history, and their provenance (origins). Then, it goes through accession or the actual introduction to the collection or archival record through cataloguing. As you can see, there are a few steps involved in this process.

Depending on your archive or organization’s practices, the length of time and depth of details in these steps of adding, assessing, and introducing new materials to your inventory will vary. However, one fact will remain constant: there must be mutual agreement and informed consent through the acquisition process about how the donated materials will be stored and maintained.

Informed Consent

Informed consent is a standard and ethical practice that is upheld while working with language speakers and other cases. It provides context to the usage of audio recordings and the essential questions of the where, how, when, and by whom materials are to be presented. Its ethics are also applied within acquisition standards for archives in the following ways:

1) The presentation of all relevant information

Donors or those providing materials to your collections should know where and how these contents will be presented, preserved, and protected.

It is typical that entries and collections have access protocols attached to them. It should be clear if donated contents will be publicly accessible, be accessed by request only, available online, or remain private and only viewable with special permissions etc.

Especially within some Indigenous frameworks and protocols, there may be reasons to keep records open to only specific families, accessible during only certain seasons, or just to those who have been formally initiated into a society. Understanding and establishing these permissions will be part of the acquisition process and initial conversations of this important step as well as factored into the appraisal stage later.

2) The donor’s understanding of the information

Discussions and responsibilities relating to the materials should be clear and understandable to all those involved in this process. It is the archivist’s responsibility to clarify and provide this information to the donor and answer questions about how materials will be cared for and kept safe. What is asked of and expected of the donor should be clear and agreed upon too like when the items will be donated.

3) Freely given consent

Oftentimes, individuals may be hesitant to donate or provide materials to be digitized.

There is a general understanding that these contents need to be preserved in an up-to-date and safe format before they become even more obsolete in their current states or damaged/degraded beyond repair. However, the actual act of what feels like ‘giving up’ these precious materials to someone else can be challenging for folks.

Informed consent in this context means that individuals are not pressured or misled into providing audio-cassette tapes or other resources to be documented or digitized.

Archivists can reassure and make individuals comfortable about:

• the collection and archive’s safety

• capacity for long-term storage

• preservation methods

They can also invite and encourage the donors to be active and involved in the digitization process themselves where possible. Additionally, archivists may also provide a copy of the newly digitized materials to the original holders of the contents after the entries have been catalogued.

Usually through the sharing of this information and opportunities to get involved in the work itself, anxieties and worries are reduced.

Depending on one’s acquisition policy, the result of someone rescinding their consent to have their materials in an archive can take different forms.

For the most part, archivists do not tend to like to shrink their inventories. It runs counter to the purpose of an archive: to be a consistent, safe space for long-term preservation. For this reason, archivists will definitely try to find a compromise instead of pulling a whole entry from a collection. In creating your policies and agreements, it will be important to emphasize the communal importance to maintain and make resources available, especially language materials for new learners.

Clarity from the beginning of the acquisition process will benefit you in forging these agreements and outlining these potential compromises, if and only if, they are necessary.

Making a Donor Agreement

In creating what is known as a donor agreement, archivists and donors can outline and agree to how materials will be presented or stored. These agreements are used to write down and define the terms of the transfer and management of the contents.

Compromises and discussions to how materials are stored may include keeping a copy of the contents while providing the originals back to the donor (for example if the donations have sentimental value or belong to a whole family) or changing accessibility protocols to be stricter to public view in line with privacy concerns. These agreements are entered into and upheld together by the archival organization and donor, so if conditions or decisions change about how the contents are managed, there is a framework to abide by and follow and parties can be held accountable to their actions.

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Making a donor agreement will serve as a foundation in managing the organization and growth of your archive.

There are different sections to add to a donor agreement, which you can tailor to your needs and policies. The Sustainable Heritage Network provides a worksheet as part of its curriculum that will guide your understanding and shape how you might create your own agreements: Collections Development Policy Worksheet | The Sustainable Heritage Network

Sections of a Donor Agreement

The following summaries are some sections for you to consider adding and expanding upon in your own donor agreements.

Description of Institution/Department (including Contact Information)

This information is essential to provide in your agreement. You should include your mission statement, a summary of policies related to acquisition, and contact information for the institution so that you are easily reachable if there are questions.

Donor Information

Donor information including contact information should be included in your agreement. This section can be expanded upon to state hereditary titles, other biographical information, and community relations if applicable.

Information about Material(s): Title, Description, Quantity, Notes, Condition, Protocols, Access Policies etc.

This section will likely be the lengthiest. You should include the main descriptive and administrative metadata associated with the donation.

If you are acquiring multiple pieces, then you can be creative and write your agreement as if you were acquiring a collection. It will save time to do so, compared to writing an agreement for each item. However, if certain pieces (e.g. pages in a text, one or two tapes out of a dozen) have special permissions or protocols attached to them, then these guidelines should be highlighted and specified in the agreement.

That said, multi-resource donations should be appraised and accessioned separately as individual entries. If they are going to be treated as single entries in the inventory, then they should be appraised, assessed, and added to your archive as such. They can be organized together in a collection, but they should be processed individually.

Digitization Needs

It is helpful to provide the steps and processes that you will undertake with the donation to get it into a digital format. In this part of the agreement, you can also offer to allow the donor to be part of the process of digitization. It can be a fun experience for folks and also a way to build trust and increase engagement with the archive in general.

Transfer Information: Ownership, Copyright, Distribution/Publication etc.

The transfer information can potentially be the most contentious or discussion-rich section of the agreement as it pertains to ownership and other rights related to materials. How the archive can and will distribute, publish, or present the new resources in question should be mentioned in this portion of the agreement.

If the donors would like to retain ownership over the material(s), it should be stated here too.

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Applicable copyrights should also be addressed.

It will be useful to either draft or have what your typical copyright and distribution plan for your collections are outlined, prior to making any donor agreements. Preemptively demonstrating that your archive is already secure and possesses different resources with varying protections establishes your organization as trustworthy and safe to store any given donation. Having a base level of protection and copyright for your collections to provide and then modify, if and only if through discussion they are needed, is much easier than reinventing these policies every time you acquire new materials.

Deaccessioning

Deaccessioning is the process of removing something from an archive so that it is no longer accessible. There can be various reasons to deaccession an entry or resource. Some examples of deaccession situations include:

• complete removal as a result of physical decay of the entry

• a return to a donor

• relocation (e.g. moving materials to a different repository or to a different institution for educational or research purposes)

Whatever the reason, you may want to add your deaccession process or the legitimate reasons that the organization would deaccession or remove a resource from an archive. Providing these examples demonstrates that removal is an option for donations or possible only under certain circumstances.

Date of Acquisition

This information is just the date that materials are formally acquired or agreed to be acquired.

Signatures

Your signatures are present to acknowledge and formalize the agreement.

A Note on Monetary Value & Donations

When it comes to acquisition methods, sometimes a transfer of funds or purchasing of items or materials is involved in obtaining new content for an institution. Be advised: money always complicates dynamics and exchanges of this nature.

It is wise to also differentiate between monetary donations from the public for the general maintenance and upkeep of a cultural centre or organization and direct monetary exchanges tied to acquisitions. These are different processes.

How an institution goes about acquiring and appraising materials are professional and individual decisions for the organization. It is suggested that within community that acquisition is promoted and encouraged without the pretense of money in any context.

If money is part of an acquisition, then it is important to explicitly describe and note the amounts involved, direction of the exchange, conditions that must be met to receive these funds, and anything else relevant to the finances of the agreement. Again, the presence of money in any agreement changes the dynamics, so clarity is your best friend to make terms understandable during and after negotiations.

Summary

Strive to ensure that in your donor agreements the following characteristics are present or described, especially when acquiring community donations:

Mutual Understanding

Founded on the principle of informed consent, both donor and archivist understand the expectations and obligations of each other related to the donation.

The donor will provide materials to be documented, indexed, and digitized while the archivists will perform this work and preserve the contents in question to be kept in some accessible, organized way.

Return of Copies

Reciprocity is important especially in maintaining strong relationships with community members. For those who donate and provide documents, tapes, and other cultural resources to your institution, there should be a consideration and action to provide copies back to these donors. This return can function as an engagement strategy if you work at a cultural centre or community archive.

For some donors, there is a fear that they will never see these belongings again. This anxiety is partially rooted in the colonial experiences and relationship between private collectors, hobbyists, and museums with Indigenous communities. In providing copies and acknowledging contributors and donors within your institution and records, this perception can be changed over time and might even encourage community members to begin donating more materials to build your archive as a community.

Responsibility & Ownership

In your agreements, responsibilities should be outlined. How and to what degree you will take care of these materials should be clear. The institution's protection and preservation methods should be described as well as the accessibility and cultural protocols you will uphold and enforce when the public engages with the materials in question.

Furthermore, who retains ownership and what publishing and copyright permissions exist related to the donation should be clarified between the organization and donor. Donors can absolutely maintain ownership over their donations in a cultural sense whereas the physical storage and care will transfer to the archive in this exchange.

Digitization has provided a draft template to modify for easy use in creating a donor agreement and strengthening your acquisition policies.

Acquisition Form Template

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For more information about the SHN and their resources, please see their site here at the Digitization Planning | The Sustainable Heritage Network