About Utah Archives Month
Utah Archives Month highlights and promotes the importance of preserving and accessing Utah’s historical records.
Curious?
Utah Archives Month is an opportunity for record holding institutions to showcase the invaluable role they play in preserving Utah’s rich and diverse history. The USHRAB coordinates an annual theme, promotional materials, and micro-grants to support a collaborative approach to promoting and advertising Utah’s record collections.
USHRAB has been making big changes throughout 2024 to how we run Utah Archives Month. If you would like to learn more, check out our presentation at the 2024 Conference of Intermountain Archivists’ Fall Caucus. Continue scrolling if you would like to learn more about American Archives Month in general.
What Is Archives Month?
American Archives Month is a collaborative effort by professional organizations and repositories around the nation to highlight the importance of records of enduring value. Archivists are professionals who assess, collect, organize, preserve, maintain control of, and provide access to information that has lasting value, and they help people find and understand the information they need in those records.
Every October, USHRAB invites Utah’s cultural heritage organizations to join in Utah Archives Month, part of the national celebration of American Archives Month. This interactive engagement helps communities and audiences connect with their cultural heritage, and reminds society that we must continually reinvest in record-keeping organizations to maintain stewardship of our histories. By raising awareness of the importance of archives, Utah Archives Month fosters a deeper appreciation for our collective past and inspires individuals and communities to actively engage in better understanding and preserving their histories.
USHRAB supports organizations statewide in their participation by creating an annual theme, developing resource packets with examples of different levels of engagement, providing a set of promotional materials specific to the year’s theme, and offering micro-grants to support local activities and events. This month-long celebration empowers Utahns to connect with their documentary heritage through engaging media outreach, events, educational programs, and exhibits.
What is an Archives?
An archives is a place where people go to find information. But rather than gathering information from books as you would in a library, people who do research in archives often gather firsthand facts, data, and evidence from letters, reports, notes, memos, photographs, audio and video recordings, and other primary sources.
What is an Archivist?
Archivists are professionals trained to pre-
serve original materials including paper documents, books, photos, maps, films, and digital records. They appraise, organ-
ize, preserve, protect, and provide access to records that have lasting value, and
they help people find and understand the
information in those materials.
Are there different types of archives?
Archives come in all shapes and sizes. There are national archives, state archives, city archives, community archives, business archives, church archives, and more. There are archives for different types of government records, and also archives that contain the personal records of people and organizations. There are archives that contain the personal papers of famous leaders (for example, Martin Luther King, Jr), authors (for example, Maya Angelou and Ernest Hemingway), scientists (for example, Albert Einstein and Marie Curie), performers, religious and business leaders, social activists, and more!