The Society of American Archivists (SAA), which is headquartered on North State Street in Chicago, establishes educational and other standards for archivists in the U.S. and Canada, and with sister organizations around the world helps establish international standards. The SAA helps archivists stay current with new technologies and practices through The American Archivist articles, Webinars, and conventions (the SAA Annual Meeting).
It helps archivists who are unemployed or unhappily employed find new jobs by circulating word about job openings through the SAA Online Career Center. Today, the SAA has approximately 5,000 individual and 650 institutional members.
The history of the SAA can be traced back to the American Historical Association (AHA), founded in 1884, the professional society to which most historians who teach American history belong. Historians depend on three other kinds of professionals to help reconstruct the past to write the history books and articles that get summarized as the textbooks we read in school: archeologists, librarians, and archivists.
Archeologists search amongst the ruins of previous civilizations to uncover lost history, which is especially important in regard to dead civilizations (as opposed to civilizations that were subsumed by later civilizations). They also hope to provide physical evidence to support or debunk historical accounts in ancient chronicles or engraved in ancient monuments, as well as modern theories about historic events.
Librarians, especially reference librarians, help historians when it comes to writing the historiography of whatever subject is under review by locating secondary sources – books and articles by professional or amateur historians – to find out what they previously had to say about the subject. They also help historians find two kinds of primary sources – the raw stuff of history – published memoirs and newspaper or magazine articles written by contemporary observers who witnessed historic events themselves or interviewed eyewitnesses.
Archivists are the keepers of the primary sources historians find most valuable when they are trying to (a) support or refute a previous account or analysis of historic events or (b) find a topic or subject that no previous historian or few previous historians have written about before. These are such things as letters, memos, telegrams, unpublished diaries and journals, account ledgers, and receipts. Sociologists, anthropologists, and other scholars, as well as writers of fiction also consult archivists.
Archival depositories are often found in libraries or are associated with libraries. Independent archives have libraries inside them. Archival programs at tertiary schools are sometimes part of library schools and other times form part of the public history component of graduate school programs in history departments of liberal arts colleges.
The AHA gave rise to the Historical Manuscripts Commission, the Public Archives Commission and, in 1909, the Conference of Archivists. This latter met on an annual basis and fostered the establishment of new archives, as well as promoted and worked to improve existent archives.
During the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA) created the Historical Records Survey and the Survey of Federal Archives. In 1934, the U.S. Congress established the National Archives as an independent agency of the U.S. Government.
Presidential libraries are really archives. During the second of his four terms in office, FDR surveyed the many papers generated by his administration, found that many documents from previous administrations had been lost, sold, or ruined by improper storage, because the heirs of presidents were free to do what they wished with those documents. Only a fraction of the documents found their way to the Library of Congress. On the advice of historians, Roosevelt determined he would found a public repository for his administration’s papers.
In 1939, he donated personal and private papers to the U.S. Government and reserved room on his Springwood estate in Hyde Park, New York to house a repository. Some of his friends founded a non-profit corporation to raise funds to build the facility, and he handed over operation of facility to the National Archives.
In 1950, Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, decided he would privately raise money for a presidential library of his own. Five years later, Congress passed the Presidential Libraries Act. It authorized the private construction of presidential libraries to be operated by the National Archives.
In the 1930s, the members of the Conference of Archivists recognized their profession was receiving greater support from the U.S. Government decided to emphasize the distinction between the historians and other scholars who studied archival materials and the archivists who were responsible for the care of those materials, as well as the organization and management of those materials.
The SAA was founded in December 1936, "...to promote sound principles of archival economy and to facilitate cooperation among archivists and archival agencies." A more democratic body than the Conference of Archivists, the SAA opened its ranks not just to directors of large archival institutions, but to all "who are or have been engaged in the custody or administration of archives or historical manuscripts."
The SAA’s first president, A.R. Newsome, and a board of directors were elected by the SAA’s initial 124 individual and four institutional members. In 1937, the SAA’s membership increased to 243 archivists and institutions, and the SAA began the practice of holding an annual convention. At the SAA Annual Meetings, archivists delivered professional papers, exchanged information, and discussed philosophies of archival organization.
At the first such SAA convention, held in June of 1937, President Newsome outlined a course for the SAA that has been followed to the present day, "to become the practical self-help agency of archivists for the solution of their complex problems" and "to strive to nationalize archival information and technique"; to seek "the solution of archival problems involving external relations with all archival agencies, with learned societies, and with the public"; and "to encourage the development of a genuine archival profession in the United States" in which SAA would "set training standards and advance archival administration through its meetings and publications." Primary among these publications was the Society's journal of record, The American Archivist, the premiere issue of which appeared in January of 1938.
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