Archive Retention Guidelines and Schedule

General Considerations
  1. The Archive is intended to permanently preserve important documents issued by the Association so that they will be available for present and future use by the Association’s members and officers as well as for research purposes by others.
  2. Only one copy of each publication or other document is to be retained.
  3. Materials which have been published in the Information Bulletin or another WAML publication will not be retained in separate form.
  4. Materials held for permanent retention are non-circulating and are not available on interlibrary loan. Photocopies of Archive materials will be provided at a nominal cost.
  5. The Archive is to be deposited in a suitable location as determined by the Executive Committee. It is to be under the supervision of an officially designated WAML archivist. Any decision regarding the permanent location for the Archive is to be submitted to the membership for ratification.
Materials to be Retained (in accordance with the above provisions)
  1. Minutes of meetings.
  2. Announcements, agendas and programs for meetings.
  3. Membership rosters.
  4. Constitutions and by-laws.
  5. Reports of officers and committees.
  6. Financial statements.
  7. Sample copies of ballots.
  8. Material generated by WAML for distribution at meetings.
  9. Correspondence. All letters and other materials relating to matters of policy or history. In general, correspondence of officers will be retained since they are the policy-making body of the organization. All non-current correspondence should be sent to the Archives for retention. This body of material will be arranged in chronological order (the IB itself serving as an index to it)
Materials Not to be retained permanently
  1. Publications received from other organizations (not retained)
  2. Returned ballots (retained for one year)
  3. Materials distributed at WAML meetings but not generated by WAML (retained for five years; available on ILL to other institutions)
  4. Responses to questionnaires (retained for five years)
  5. Replies to meeting announcements; reservation correspondence (not retained)
  6. Checks, bank statements, invoices, etc. (retained for seven years)
  7. Drafts of articles or other publications subsequently issued by WAML; routine correspondence about articles (retained one year; usually better if retained by the editor or production manager for the publication)
  8. Issues of the Information Bulletin, the Occasional Paper and microform publications (these are widely held by WAML and other libraries).

Original by Phil Hoehn, 1994, 1999.