Publication Date
January 1987
Abstract
Concern with problems associated with documenting nontraditional and minority movements for cultural, economic, social, and political change has been expressed previously in the archival literature, but certainly not in proportion to the dimensions of such a problem. If one admits that the prevailing values of a given society generally correspond to the values of the prevailing socioeconomic strata of that society, it is not at all surprising that archivists should have been preoccupied with accumulating a documentary record of the lives of the members of the prevailing strata and of the activities and functions of the institutions that provide the collective infrastructure for that strata. It was only with the social and political ferment of the 1960s and 1970s that some archivists began to address the need to document the lives of individuals and the roles of institutions identified with or involved in countervailing movements whose very raison d'etre compelled them to oppose predominant structures and ideological values.