I've been following the thread on "keeping textbooks" with interest, and I would like to add a comment. I'll begin by mentioning two publications: Charles H. Holbrow, "Archaeology of a Bookstack: Some Major Introductory Physics Texts of the Last 150 Years," Physics Today, March 1999, and Frances Fitzgerald's "America Revised; History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century" (1980). Holbrow's article, which was researched in large part here, points out that successive physics textbooks show when new ideas are introduced into the curriculum and reflect changes in pedagogical styles in science over time, which another historian has characterized as going through periodic cycles from easy to rigorous and back again. Fitzgerald's book, which is an influential and highly critical historiography of American history textbooks, contributed to the "textbook wars" between traditionalists, led by then NEH chair Lynn Cheney, and revisionists in the 1980s and after. My point in mentioning these titles is, of course, to show that perceptive scholars have used old textbooks to help understand what goes on inside college classrooms, a world that is usually poorly documented in college and university archives, as Helen Samuels, Rick Teller, and others have noted. These books can also contribute to intellectual history; a student recently used our old textbooks to identify a dozen different interpretations of the physical meaning of a now fundamental mathematical technique called Feynman Diagrams. And in our experience, comprehensive textbook collections in our field are hard to find. The conflicting responses on this thread (chuck 'em out vs. keep 'em) suggest an important distinction in how we define the nature of archives and the work of archivists, between broad and strict constructions. Like many college archives, the archival collection here at the Niels Bohr Library is part of a special collection that holds a mix of materials that document our field: books, oral histories, records, manuscripts, etc. As a result it's easy for us to justify our large collection of successive editions of textbooks in modern physics, astronomy, and allied fields. But I believe that archivists have a responsibility to be aware of the larger world of sources that document their fields and to encourage their colleagues to preserve important sources outside the canon of archival formats. And if they aren't successful in negotiating with librarians or other colleagues, then they're justified in keeping especially important collections like textbooks, at least until they can find a more enlightened library to take them off their hands or can make sure that the works are accessible elsewhere. Of course it may be necessary to be selective here as elsewhere, especially for the huge volume of materials published since the 1960s. Some professors give us book collections that contain a large number of "inspection copies" of textbooks that were never even opened. Twenty years ago my predecessor, Joan Warnow-Blewett, and other archivists, initially mostly within the sciences, developed a new approach to identifying and collecting archival sources called documentation strategy. A central tenet was that archivists need to work actively with records creators, records users, and other archives in planning to document their field. Documentation research and documentation strategy still inform our work in trying to identify and save hard-to-preserve areas in our field like industrial R&D. Working with colleagues in other departments, for example technical librarians and records managers, is also an important part of that work. Joe Anderson Niels Bohr Library Center for History of Physics American Institute of Physics A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List sponsored by the Society of American Archivists, www.archivists.org. For the terms of participation, please refer to http://www.archivists.org/listservs/arch_listserv_terms.asp. To subscribe or unsubscribe, send e-mail to [log in to unmask] In body of message: SUB ARCHIVES firstname lastname *or*: UNSUB ARCHIVES To post a message, send e-mail to [log in to unmask] Or to do *anything* (and enjoy doing it!), use the web interface at http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html Problems? Send e-mail to Robert F Schmidt <[log in to unmask]>