| Chapter : | Introduction |
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opportunity to explore different—and, we argue, more innovative and fruitful—approaches to research. But we also hope to reach intrepid junior faculty and even more senior political scientists who are interested in expanding their approach to the study of politics and traversing a road less traveled.
In conceiving this book, we hope to produce a volume that we wish had existed when we first started working with archival collections. All of us were “classically” trained political scientists, which is to say that we had no training in archival research and rarely heard archives mentioned in political science circles. We each found our way into archival research, but we each faced a steep learning curve and little to no direction written from the perspective of political science. We also encountered mostly skeptical colleagues who were hardly models of encouragement. We hope this book will be helpful to scholars before they hit that steep learning curve, offering the necessary encouragement to them to follow a road that few political scientists, at this point, have dared to travel.
What Are Archives?
Broadly speaking, archives are collections of records—both paper and electronic records—that are generated by, and reflect the efforts of, an individual, organization, or institution. The archival records that we discuss in this volume have been generated by politicians, political organizations, and political institutions.
Archives are more than the boxes of papers one keeps in one’s garage, however. They are records that have been judged, usually by an archivist, as being worthy of preservation; they are considered to contain information that may be important for understanding some aspect of the human experience. In short, someone has decided that the records are important enough to be stored in controlled conditions and that the public should have access to them.