HBS Archives: 1908 to present

Kress Collection: 15th-20th centuries, chiefly before 1850

Manuscripts: Business records of firms and individuals. Manuscripts cover the broadest range of business activities, including: agricultural, manufacturing, construction, publishing, and recreation industries; transportation, communication, and commodity utilities; marketing, financial, professional, and personal services; and business affairs of private, public, and governmental organizations. Formats include personal papers, business records, photographs, account books, logbooks, scrapbooks, printed ephemera and trade cards. Current strength is 18th and 19th-century New England industries.

Harvard Business School Archives: Administrative records; faculty papers; doctoral theses; faculty, staff, and student publications; pictorial materials; and printed ephemera by and about the Harvard Business School. Major subject areas represented are management, business administration, and business education and student life.

Kress: Primarily early English and European business and economic manuscripts concerning commerce, banking, finance, and manufacturing. Also included are the personal papers of Herbert Somerton Foxwell, economist and collector of the books forming the core of the Kress Collection.

All of the library's manuscript and archival collections, as well as books and periodicals, are cataloged in the HOLLIS Catalog, Harvard’s online computer catalog.

Most of the business manuscript collections are included in Manuscripts in Baker Library: A Guide to Sources for Business, Economic, and Social History, 4th ed. Complied by Robert W. Lovett and Eleanor C. Bishop (1978). In the guide, the collections are arranged by industry, while the industries themselves are arranged to mirror the structure of a developed economy. Entries consisted of company name, location, inclusive dates, volume of records, and a few sentences of description. The volumes includes a name, place, company, and industry index.

A small but growing number of finding aids are available online through OASIS. Additional finding aids are available on the Historical Collections Web site ( http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/findingresources/index.html#oasis).

"Women, Enterprise and Society: A Guide to Resources in the Business Manuscripts Collection at Baker Library" (http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/wes). This guide identifies materials that document more than two hundred years of women's participation in American business, society and culture."

Catalog records for 1,000 of Baker Library's advertising trade cards, with accompanying digital images, are now available through the Visual Information Access (VIA) system, (http://via.harvard.edu:748/html/VIA.html) a new online catalog of visual resources at Harvard.

A Web Guide to Photograph Collections highlights an important resource for scholars across many disciplines. Today the photographic collections hold more than 22,000 images of factories, equipment, techniques, processes, and people at work in industrial settings. Researchers will find photographs relating to U.S. industry as well as business operations in Central and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

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Last modified 12 Feb 2012