Transferring your organization's records to the Archives

The Duke University Archives is interested in documenting the activities of Duke student and employee organizations. We invite you to preserve a record of your group's activities by placing its inactive files in the Archives now. They'll be available here for use by your members, and in years to come, for research by your successors or by those interested in life at Duke.

The Archives office is in Perkins Library. You can call us at 660-5820 or use our web form to send an email. Please include your campus box number.

We preserve correspondence, minutes, reports, final budget statements and similar summary financial data, scrapbooks, newsletters, programs of events, photographs, and other material. If you publish a newsletter or circulate notices, we'd appreciate being placed on your mailing list.

We ask that you do the following:

• Use our boxes. They're free of charge for records being sent to the Archives, and can be picked up any weekday (9am-5pm). Please call 660-5820 beforehand.
  
• Don't overstuff the box; leave a bit of working room. 
  
• Do not write on the boxes; we will put on a permanent label here. Just tape a sheet of paper to the box, with your organization name, the date and name of a contact person, and label it "To University Archives."
• Don't send us paper in hanging folders or send us boxes of loose paper. We'll give you archival quality file folders if you need them.
• Prepare a list of the folder titles, including the start and end dates of the material in the folder. When you need to find something, this list will be invaluable. See our sample lists for examples. If a list is not appropriate, write a brief description of the contents instead. Be sure to include your group's name on the list.
• Bring the records to 206 Perkins Library. When we've logged them in, we'll send you a receipt. Please keep it and pass it on to your successors; the accession number on it is what we use to find the records.