Helen Willa Samuels

Helen Willa Samuels (born 1943) is an American archivist and scholar in archival studies. She is best known for her 1986 essay "Who Controls the Past", which introduced the concept of archival documentation strategy, and her 1992 book Varsity Letters: Documenting Modern Colleges and Universities.

Biography Helen Samuels was born in Queens, New York City, in 1943. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Queens College in 1964 and a Masters in Library Science from Simmons College in 1965. She began her career in libraries in 1967 as the Music Specialist at the Massachusetts Public Library in Brookline, and worked as the Music Librarian at the Hilles Library at Radcliffe College until 1972.

In 1972 she was hired by the University of Cincinnati to run their fledgling archival program, a repository participating of the Ohio Historical Society's regional network. There she collaborated with faculty in the history department in order to create the university's first institutional archive, In 1977, she became the first Institute Archivist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she built a collection of institutional records to document the history of the university. Based on her experience in this position and funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant, she wrote Varsity Letters: Documenting Modern Colleges and Universities, which was published in 1992, and which received the Society of American Archivists' Waldo Gifford Leland Award. She emphasized a “documentation strategy” for appraisal and intake of collections that consists of researching and documenting society and its institutions in an active, systematic, and comprehensive way. Whereas collections policies governed the appraisal choices within an individual institutional archive, a documentation strategy would be based on subject, governing that process across several different repositories. Samuels noted the importance of collaboration between complementary institutions, as only a small fraction of archival records can be preserved by each archive. Although Samuels wrote this text specifically for colleges and universities, the archival practice of institutional functional analysis has been applied in many other institutional settings.

Selected publications Processing Manual for the Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1981) "An Analysis of Processing Procedures: The Adaptable Approach." (with Karen T. Lynch), American Archivist 45 / Spring 1982 American Archivist Volume 49, Number 2 / Spring 1986 "The Roots of 128: A Hypothetical Documentation Strategy" (with Philip N. Alexander), American Archivist 50 / Fall 1987 "The Archivist's First Responsibility: A Research Agenda to Improve the Identification and Retention of Records of Enduring Value" (with Richard J. Cox), American Archivist 51 / Winter/Spring 1988). North American Archival Identity," Second European Conference on Archival Proceedings, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1989 (Paris: International Conference on the Archives, 1989) Varsity Letters: Documenting Modern Colleges and Universities. Chicago, Ill.: Society of American Archivists; Metuchen, N.J. : Scarecrow Press, 1992 Improving Our Disposition: Documentation Strategies, Archivaria 33 (Winter 1991–92): 125-40 Controlling the past: documenting society and institutions: essays in honor of Helen Willa Samuels Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2011