Culver Academies: An Archives for the Secondary School
As an educator and a historian, I have a keen interest in the historical development of curricula, as well as institutional heritage and culture. In an attempt to formulate a plan for Culver Academies to preserve its own current curriculum development processes, I researched current practices for academic archives.
It was my hope to discover a set of “best practices” in place at boarding schools, colleges, and universities, and adapt them for the fledgling archives of the Culver Academies. Alas, I discovered instead that all institutions are struggling to preserve curricular heritage in the digital age. This paper, then, became an argument for the academic archives, and a call for archivists to develop practices to support administrative, faculty, and student users, rather than historians, as their primary audience.