Reading Response 7: Chute on Outreach at the University Archives

Tamar G. Chute’s 2000 article entitled “Selling the College and University Archives: Current Research Perspectives,” provides an analysis of the importance of outreach for college and university archives and discusses specific approaches that have both failed and succeeded.  The author based the analysis in this article on testimony from 8 different repositories regarding outreach efforts.

In this piece, Chute defines outreach as “anything that puts the archives and the archivist in contact with the public.”  Chute also discusses the division the notion of outreach into direct and indirect varieties.  Direct outreach refers to any outreach activity that involved direct contact between an individual and archival material or an archivist.  Indirect outreach refers to the impact of an archival repository on a community in general, and encompasses the ability of an archives to generate interest amongst people who have not visited the repository. 

In this article, Chute argues that outreach is a core function of a working archivist, and is of equal importance to appraisal, arrangement, and description, and that outreach should efforts should be steady and consistent.  Based on analysis of the 8 repositories, Chute writes that students, faculty, and staff should be the primary targets of outreach efforts.  With regard to strategies, Chute discusses the importance of exhibits, presentations, listservs, effective web design, the use of the media to promote a repository and its collection.  Chute also identifies several strategizes for analyzing the success of an outreach efforts; archivists should evaluate the widespread impact of the effort, the ability of the effort to teach potential users how archives can be useful, the promotion of particular collections of interest through the effort, the ability of an outreach effort to provide historical information about the institution, and the ability of the outreach effort to communicate the usefulness of archival staff and material.

While this article predates the popularity of social media as a means of online promotion, the strategies discussed in this article are all significant outreach strategies which should be considered by archivist.  The advice provided in this article could be improved by an expanding of the target audience to include occupational users outside of the institution.


Tamar G. Chute. “Selling the College and University Archives: Current Research Perspectives,” Archival Issues, 25.1&2 (2000), 33-48.