Archives & Special Collections

College Archives Policy & Procedures

Purpose

The RVCC Archives were developed to preserve items of historical value to the College and to provide a historical and chronological perspective of the college mission. They contain items pertaining to the academic, cultural, and governance growth of the institution, and to significant events that were sponsored by faculty, staff, students, administration, and campus groups such as the College Forum, College Foundation, academic committees, clubs, etc.

The Archives do not duplicate items that are the rightful responsibility of Academic Affairs or the registrar, such as student's records, course syllabi, schedules, etc., nor does it contain items of confidentiality, such as personnel records. All items in the Archives are available for public scrutiny.

Acquisition

1. Monographs, scholarly articles, and other publications by faculty or staff members of Raritan Valley Community College.
2. Publications and ephemera from all departments, institutes, extension services, programs, committees, administrative units, and associated organizations of the College. If these documents are available digitally through the RVCC Commons, there is no need to collect physical duplications in the Archives.
3. Publications and ephemera from all student organizations and groups. If these documents are available digitally through the RVCC Commons, there is no need to collect physical duplications in the Archives.
4. Publications and ephemera from any state or county-supported organization closely associated with the College and important to the documentation of the College history.

The Archives may include items of a variety of physical formats, such as books, magazines, papers, photographs, video, audio, computer storage media, etc.

An item may be removed from the Archives if, in the opinion of the Archivist, it no longer meets the objectives of the College Archives. Items may also be removed or updated if they are contained in/on a dated storage format. In the event that items are withdrawn, they may be returned to the office from which they originated.

Organization

In accordance with established archival practice, the Archives are organized according to their office of provenance--the office or person that generated the document. Materials will be notated with their office of provenance and with the date received in the Archives. Newer materials will be filed in front of the other materials from the same office.

Preservation

An attempt will be made to preserve these materials through out the life of the institution. Acid-free storage units, folders, etc. will be used to help preserve the documents. The use of the documents shall be restricted to further increase the life of the item. They are a "closed stacks" special collection.

Users

The use of the Archives is limited to members of the College community, and to members of the public by appointment, during regular library hours. College users are strongly encouraged to schedule appointments to ensure someone is available to provide assistance.

Procedures for use

Please follow this link to schedule an appointment to view materials: https://raritanval.libcal.com/appointments/archives

Original documents may not be removed from the Archives area, except for photocopying, scanning, or photographing in the library with permission. College faculty, staff, and administrators may sign out items to borrow. Requests for specific items must be made at least 24 hours in advance.

College Archives Policy updated 3/30/22 by Janelle Varin

Digital Archives Policy

Purpose

The purpose of digitizing the RVCC Archives is to increase public access to items that are of greatest value. Value may be determined by patron need, uniqueness, relevance to curricula, significance to the academic, cultural, and governance growth of the institution, or other factors to be determined by the librarians at Evelyn S. Field Library with input from campus constituents. Significant consideration will be given to what is known about an item; materials with unclear provenance or content (such as unlabeled photographs) will not be prioritized. These items may be considered for future “crowd-sourcing” efforts. Selection guidelines from the Collection Development Policy will also be taken into account.

A secondary outcome of digitizing the RVCC College Archives is the preservation of formats that may deteriorate over time. As items are digitized for public access, it only makes sense to create a preservation copy. This is in keeping with the College Archives Policy which states “The RVCC Archives were developed to preserve items of historical value to the College.”

Items to be digitized will be selected from existing RVCC Archives holdings. As new materials are added to the Archives, they, too, will be considered for digitization based on the same criteria. Born-digital materials will be considered for preservation and addition to public access platforms using the same criteria as digitized items. We will use current archival description standards for cataloging and storing digital files.

In keeping with the College Archives Policy, digital archives will not duplicate items that are the rightful responsibility of another department with their own document retention and access policy.

Policy for take-down requests

If you hold the rights to materials in our digitized collections that are unattributed, please let us know so that we may update the copyright information. If you are a rights holder and believe you have found items for which you have not granted permission to digitize (or are not covered by a copyright exception under US copyright laws), or if you feel material is infringing upon your privacy, you may request its removal by submitting this form: https://raritanval.libwizard.com/f/ArchivalTakeDown. Upon receiving the form, we will remove the material from public view while we assess the issues you identified.