HBS Archives: 1908 to present

Kress Collection manuscripts: 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.

Baker Library's manuscript holdings were accumulated as a result of the efforts of the Harvard Business School (HBS) to document American business activity. The first meeting of the school's Overseers Visiting Committee, in January 1909, callcd for "a systematic and serious attempt to collect unprinted documents related to business," then a novel idea. In 1915 Arthur H. Cole, a Harvard graduate student in economic history studying with HBS's first dean, Edwin Gay, acquired for the school the Slater textile mill records, the first documented substantial manuscripts accession. During this same period, Frederick Jackson Turner's Harvard Commission on the History of the American West unearthed business manuscripts, which it later turned over to HBS.

In the 1920s, HBS Dean Wallace Brett Donham organized the Business Historical Society (BHS), invited Norman S.B. Gras and Henrietta Larson to come to HBS to found and teach a new discipline, business history, and hired Arthur Cole to head the new business library. The BHS, composed of librarians, historians, and businessmen, immediately began to fulfill its charge: educating companies and repositories to the historical value of business operating records, and acquiring records for Baker Library. Gras and Larson made contacts within companies during research projects, which often resulted in the firms' donating their records to Baker Library. Cole, while pursuing a career as an economic historian, organized the manuscript holdings by deciding to collect from New England firms and by developing description procedures based on record series, one of the earliest American uses of this system.

HISTORY: The Kress Library of Business and Economics opened its doors in 1938, established through the efforts of Dean Wallace Donham and his colleagues, and the gift of Claude Washington Kress. The Kress gift financed the purchase of the private collection of Herbert Somerton Foxwell and provided quarters in Baker Library suitable for a rare book room.

Foxwell, throughout his career as professor of economics at University College in London and as fellow of St. John's, Cambridge, amassed two significant rare book collections in the history of business and economics. He began collecting in 1875 and was forced to sell his first collection in 1901 due to financial difficulties. The Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths purchased the collection and presented it to the University of London, where the Goldsmiths’ Library still resides. With the proceeds from the sale, Foxwell began assembling a second collection, which became the foundation of the Kress Library.

In 1989 the Kress Library of Business and Economics merged with the Manuscript and Archives Department to form the present Historical Collections Department.

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 and in the Baker Library 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/collections/mss/finding_aids.shtml).

"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.

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