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Placement of State Archives and Records Management Programs

State archives and records management programs operate within a variety of administrative settings. This table shows all of the levels of authority between the head of the state archives and/or records management program and the governor (or legislature in Arizona and Tennessee). The immediate parent agency for each program is indicated with bold face type. In some cases the parent agency is, in turn, part of a larger agency. Those are indicated with regular type. Totals for the number of programs which are part of each type of parent agency are given at the bottom of the columns.

This information was gathered during the latest comprehensive survey (FY2004) of state archives and records programs by the Council of State Archivists (CoSA) (formerly the Council of State Historical Records Coordinators), with funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) and updated in 2005.

There seems to be a continued trend toward consolidation of archives and records management programs. In the 1960s, Ernst Posner found 24 joint and 16 split programs (10 states had limited or no programs at that time). By 1993, there were 34 joint programs in the states. Currently, the archives and records management programs are jointly run in 37 states and operate separately in 12 states. The two most recent consolidations have occurred in Iowa (1998) and Michigan (2002).

While all 50 states and the District of Columbia have designated an agency to manage the government’s archival records, two states currently have no substantive records management agency for state government (AR, MN).
For more data from all of CoSA’s surveys, 1993-date, visit http://www.statearchivists.org/reports/

Questions or concerns? Contact CoSA at info@statearchivists.org.
Last updated: November 6, 2005 .