Archives

Archives are the organized physical collections of primary source materials and non-current records of the activities of an organization or business, government, or an institution such as Lehigh. Personal papers of individuals or families can also be contained in archives, and are usually permanently contributed to a library and identified according to provenance. Archives are usually in a repository, managed and maintained by a trained archivist.

Archives can be classified in two broad categories:

• institutional archives maintained by a parent institution. Lehigh University, for example, has in-house archives of the papers of past Lehigh presidents.
• collecting archives such as the research papers of Lehigh faculty or the business records of alumni.