page_title: Archive
section_title: Users and institutions
hierarchical_section_title: Archive / Users and institutions
caption_attribution_description: Österreichisches Staatsarchiv in Erdberg
context_page_description: An archive is an accumulation of historical records – in any media – or the physical facility in which they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organization's lifetime, and are kept to show the function of that person or organization. Professional archivists and historians generally understand archives to be records that have been naturally and necessarily generated as a product of regular legal, commercial, administrative, or social activities. They have been metaphorically defined as "the secretions of an organism", and are distinguished from documents that have been consciously written or created to communicate a particular message to posterity.
  In general, archives consist of records that have been selected for permanent or long-term preservation on grounds of their enduring cultural, historical, or evidentiary value. Archival records are normally unpublished and almost always unique, unlike books or magazines of which many identical copies may exist.
context_section_description: Historians, genealogists, lawyers, demographers, filmmakers, and others conduct research at archives. The research process at each archive is unique, and depends upon the institution that houses the archive.  While there are many kinds of archives, the most recent census of archivists in the United States identifies five major types: academic, business (for profit), government, non-profit, and other. There are also four main areas of inquiry involved with archives: material technologies, organizing principles, geographic locations, and tangled embodiments of humans and non-humans.  These areas help to further categorize what kind of archive is being created.
caption: Reading room of the Österreichisches Staatsarchiv (Austrian State Archive), in the Erdberg district of Vienna (2006)
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