ABSTRACT
Business records are rarely generated for the purpose of building a historical archive. A series of decisions and actions must be taken if records are to be preserved as archives for the long term. Once potential historical records have been identified, they must undergo accessioning, appraisal and cataloguing to enable their future use. The importance of these key activities is often overlooked and they may not be given due consideration when other priorities arise. Companies naturally focus on the achievement of business objectives that impact the bottom line and archivists managing their archives in-house must both prioritise internal requests and align collections to support wider corporate strategies. In the public archives environment, bulky, complex business archives often compete for attention with more heavily used or smaller collections which are easier to process.
