The foundation for contemporary research and scholarship in history lies in the primary source materials that are available in libraries and archives throughout the world. It is the surviving historical documents—the letters, reports, accounts, pamphlets, books, and images—that allow a story to be told. These individual documents act as evidence pieced together to both describe and interpret history, as well as challenge commonly held assumptions.
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Unique among business school libraries, Baker Library possesses remarkably comprehensive and diverse historical collections that offer a window on the development and growth of business and industry from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries. A new exhibition, Tracking the Elusive Document: Contemporary Research in Historical Collections, examines the varied uses, both traditional and nontraditional, of primary source materials in contemporary scholarly research. It looks at several recent publications that have used the collections of Baker Library.
See Current Research for examples from the exhibit, which runs from February 2nd to May 24th in the lobby of Baker Library.
Established in 1908, the Harvard Business School was one of the earliest institutions to offer a graduate program in business administration. The initial focus was to develop and define a business curriculum and the academic and scholarly literature that would accompany it. Wallace B. Donham, the second dean of the Harvard Business School from 1919 to 1942, vigorously pursued the goal of establishing the historical component of business literature and business studies.
Under the leadership of Dean Donham and Arthur Cole, economic historian and second librarian of Baker Library, there was widespread collection development at Baker Library, particularly of historical documents to support business history research. Although many institutions held business records as components of other collections, this was the first time that the administrative and operating records of businesses were sought purely for their own historical and scholarly value.
In a short address titled 'Tracking the Elusive Document,' Cole described the particular issues that the business historian faced in conducting research:
The historian of business encounters difficulties which are in some respects more baffling than those of other historians, especially if he attempts to penetrate the "dark ages" of seventy-five or a hundred years ago. ... At best, all such digging into the past is complicated and difficult, as any one who has tried historical investigation of any sort would admit; but it seems as though he who tries to piece together a story of business meets additional serious obstacles.
Cole concludes his essay with a plea:
To trace the intimate history of an old industry or an early institution, nothing can take the place of original documents. ...Wherefore, the business historian earnestly begs the business men of the country to preserve all documents... and make them somehow and somewhere available to serious students of business development.
Traditionally, the historical collections of Baker Library have been used heavily for topics in business and economic history and they continue to be used by scholars who are researching areas such as corporate history, the history of accounting, entrepreneurial history, the history of commerce, and business biography. The rich and comprehensive holdings also allow for the extensive comparative analysis of specific industries and individual companies. In addition, the detailed data available in the large manuscript collections meets the needs of the quantitative methods and analysis that characterize current scholarly research.
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Increasingly, however, the collections are being sought out by a broad range of scholars involved in cross-disciplinary studies, such as ethnic and gender studies. The thousands of account books, logbooks, diaries, ledgers, correspondence, research papers, rare books and pamphlets held at Baker Library offer evidence to allow scholars to investigate the important theories, organizations, movements, and individuals that have shaped our world today. Scholars search out these resources to not only find the documentary evidence to support their hypotheses but also to better understand and portray the historical context of their research.
One must understand the changes in the economic life of an era to fully comprehend the rhythm of the day-to-day lives of men, women, and children. The cultures that people created, the way they thought about themselves, and the values they held and passed on were created and shared all within the context of the business world that surrounded them and the economic circumstances that defined their time in history. There is a growing awareness that business collections are a unique and vital component in understanding social and cultural history.
In some cases the resources at Baker Library have simply provided the documentary evidence for research initiatives. In other cases, the historical materials themselves have shaped the research and directed the scholar in unexpected new directions. In developing the historical collections of Baker Library, Dr. Cole hoped to 'track down the elusive documents' and provide a permanent home for them within the Harvard Business School. Dr. Cole's search was motivated by his desire to supply business historians with the raw material to research and write company and industry histories. Over the decades, the collections have provided the data to support business historians as well as scholars from a variety of disciplines. Today we see new scholars discovering these valuable resources and approaching them with new questions and focuses of study unthought of even ten years ago.
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