Business and Labor scholars are increasingly looking to archives for primary sources related to their research areas, yet the process of finding relevant archival collections can often feel overwhelming and opaque. This presentation will help demystify archival research and highlight how to find materials in management and labor archives, led by three archivists from the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives at Cornell University, the largest repository dedicated to collecting materials related to both management and labor.
The Kheel Center collects business records, management history and management theorists’ papers, foreign and domestic fortune 500 corporate company pamphlets, employee newsletters and benefit plans, personnel practice manuals, union busting records, environmental policies, and affirmative action policies. We also have extensive holdings of labor union records that provide both perspectives for scholars.
This presentation will briefly highlight physical and digital archives from the Kheel Center that are of interest to business historians. We will also discuss other avenues of research such as locating business and labor union records in other archival repositories, using digital collections and libguides, collections on microfilm that can be accessed remotely, corporate and labor directories, and expert search tips from Cornell archivists. We’ll demonstrate strategic ways to locate materials that may not always be obvious including finding business records within union collections, faculty research collections, oral histories, pamphlet collections, and more.
The last 30 minutes will be reserved for those in the audience to ask questions related to any difficulties they might be having in using archival collections.