Introduction to business archives

Archiving documents from businesses and industry requires archival expertise. At the same time, companies have specific requirements for their archives. In our courses, we combine these specific requirements with archival skills and knowledge in order to establish a solid foundation for business and company archives.

Records management sometimes has a reputation for being a very complex and administrative topic. Why should business archivists concern themselves with process-based business procedures in day-to-day company management when their core competencies lie in historically relevant sources for corporate history? However, a basic knowledge of records management offers you all kinds of advantages for the archive: you act as an information manager to ensure that analogue and digital documents are traceable, complete and legally compliant. In this way, you make a significant contribution to strengthening compliance within the company and, at the same time, ensure that the historical records of the company are of higher quality thanks to a structured approach.

My motto is: ‘Preserve yesterday for tomorrow today.’ But those who preserve history must also tell its story. Make the work visible.

Best practices – after studying history and philosophy at the Universities of Konstanz and Hamburg, worked as an editor for the Journal of Historical Science and as a research assistant at the German Museum of Technology. Since 1998, has been working at Robert Bosch GmbH as a historian and operator of the Bosch History Blog. In 2023, the department was awarded the title of Business Archive of the Year by the VdW.

Archival cataloguing is more than just documentation – it is the art of balancing pragmatism and meticulousness with a clear vision and keen intuition. This introductory module teaches the basics using selected examples.

"Since 1988, one of the main areas of research at the Deutsche Bank Historical Institute has been the Nazi era. Deutsche Bank was the first German financial institution to conduct a thorough and unreserved investigation into this era. This article focuses on how the company's attitude towards its Nazi past developed, how the topic was communicated, how it was received by the public, and what lessons can be learned after more than three decades."

Das Verständnis unserer Vergangenheit setzt die unverzichtbare Aufbewahrung ihrer Quellen voraus. Eine intelligente Archivierung agiert sowohl präventiv als auch reaktiv, erreicht ihre Ziele jedoch nur, wenn auch das Archivgebäude und sein Personal – Schutzschild und Hüter der historischen Quellen – Ereignissen standhalten oder umgehend darauf reagieren können, um gravierende Schäden zu vermeiden und ihre schnelle Behebung zu ermöglichen. Dies ist der Grundgedanke der Resilienz für die Archive.