In the early 1980s, an MIT archivist named Helen Willa Samuels published a series of essays that rattled the field. Archivists had long been trained to acquire and describe what organizations or individuals deposited in their custody. But Samuels pointed out something uncomfortable: this approach was not enough.
Modern society produced documentation that was sprawling, fragmented, and ephemeral. No single archive could hope to acquire it all, and waiting passively for donors or transfers meant whole areas of civic life would vanish undocumented. Samuels proposed a solution: the documentation strategy.
The Original Idea
A documentation strategy, she argued, was not a collecting plan for one institution. It was a collaborative, society-wide approach to documenting an issue, activity, or community.
The steps looked deceptively simple:
Identify the domain or issue to be documented, such as labor relations, scientific research, or environmental activism.
Map the functions, players, and processes that generated records, such as government agencies, advocacy groups, corporations, and communities.
Assess existing documentation and identify gaps.
Prioritize what needs to be captured to tell a complete and balanced story.
Coordinate responsibilities across repositories to make sure the whole picture, not just fragments, was preserved.
The key insight was to focus on functions and activities rather than only organizations. If the goal was to document environmental regulation, for example, the strategy had to encompass not only the regulatory agency’s files but also industry records, scientific reports, citizen petitions, and activist ephemera.
It was a radical departure from “wait and see” collecting. Documentation strategy put archivists in a proactive role, deciding together what mattered and how to ensure its survival.
Why It Mattered
Samuels’ proposal was both practical and political. On the practical side, it acknowledged resource limits: no archive can keep everything, so choices must be deliberate. On the political side, it aimed to democratize the record. By asking who the players were in a given domain, archivists could avoid an exclusive focus on powerful institutions and seek out voices from communities and movements that shaped the same history.
Documentation strategy influenced later approaches like macroappraisal in Canada and continues to be cited whenever archivists confront large, messy domains of records creation.
Extending Samuels’ Legacy
The influence of Samuels’ work is perhaps most clearly visible in the 2011 volume Controlling the Past, edited by Terry Cook. This collection honored Samuels by gathering essays on documenting modern society and exploring how appraisal decisions shape collective memory. Cook’s introduction positioned documentation strategy as a turning point in North American archival thought, one that made clear the power archivists wield in determining what survives as evidence. The essays extend Samuels’ insight into the digital era, examining how electronic records management, corporate archives, and community documentation all force archivists to confront the ethical weight of “controlling the past.” In this light, documentation strategy is not simply a technical exercise but a societal responsibility, one that requires transparency, reflexivity, and a recognition that records professionals shape how the future will understand the present.
Recent scholarship has also carried Samuels’ framework forward in practical terms. The 2019 collection Appraisal and Acquisition: Innovative Practices for Archives and Special Collections, edited by Kate Theimer, highlights how archivists are applying documentation strategies to digital platforms, collaborative collecting projects, and community partnerships. The contributors show that strategy is no longer confined to institutional planning documents but actively reshapes how archives engage with creators and users. From crowdsourced acquisitions to proactive harvesting of digital content, these approaches echo Samuels’ insistence that documentation must be intentional, functional, and shared across boundaries. The volume demonstrates how documentation strategy continues to evolve as both theory and practice, linking the archivist’s conceptual map to the day-to-day work of building collections in a digital society.
A New Century, New Challenges
Fast forward forty years and the challenges Samuels named are amplified. The records of social life are now:
Born-digital and distributed across countless platforms, from email servers to cloud collaboration tools to social media feeds.
Volatile and fragile, subject to deletion, format obsolescence, or platform shutdown.
Created outside traditional institutions, in communities, networks, and movements with little infrastructure for preservation.
The abundance of records paradoxically increases the risk of loss: without intentional capture, digital documentation disappears as quickly as it is created.
In this context, documentation strategy reads less like an abstract theory and more like an urgent design principle.
From Strategy to Design by Default
The modern translation of Samuels’ insight is this: if documentation is important, it must be built into systems at the front end.
Where Samuels called for deliberate, collaborative strategies, today’s information professionals have the chance to embed those strategies in system requirements, data models, and code.
Business events → Record triggers. Each function identified in a documentation strategy maps to a system event that must generate or capture a record.
Actors and processes → Metadata. The strategy’s map of stakeholders and activities becomes a minimum metadata profile that records who, what, when, where, why, and how.
Gaps → Retention and transfer rules. If an area is under-documented, retention policies can be extended, or automatic transfers to archival repositories can be built into workflows.
Equity goals → Access controls and consent models. If the aim is to document marginalized communities responsibly, the system design can require consent terms, embargo options, or community-driven descriptive metadata.
The archival strategy is no longer just a paper plan, it is operationalized as policy-as-code.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Imagine a public health agency during an epidemic. Samuels might have said: “To document outbreak response, you need the regulator’s orders, the scientists’ data, the activists’ campaigns, and the community’s experiences.”
In today’s system design, this translates to:
Automatic capture of key decision documents (orders, advisories, meeting minutes) when issued.
Structured metadata fields for outbreak location, community affected, and measures taken, so future researchers can see context.
Retention rules that ensure these records are preserved long enough for accountability and then transferred to an archival repository with integrity checks.
Consent-aware intake for oral histories or community-submitted data, with options for embargo or staged release.
The documentation strategy becomes a system blueprint that ensures the record is born complete, accountable, and preservable.
Sidebar Timeline: From Documentation Strategy to Design by Default
1982–1986: Helen Willa Samuels articulates “documentation strategy” in key essays and presentations, urging archivists to move from passive collecting to proactive, collaborative documentation of functions and issues.
1990s: Macroappraisal in Canada builds on these ideas, focusing appraisal on functions of government and society rather than specific record series. Documentation strategy gains international attention.
2000s: Digital shift accelerates. The spread of email, web content, and early cloud platforms highlights gaps in documentation. Archivists experiment with community archives, oral histories, and collaborative collecting projects to fill them.
2010s: Born-digital abundance meets fragility. Social media and mobile tools create vast documentation but little infrastructure for capture or preservation. Archivists stress the need for “records at creation,” echoing Samuels’ call for intentional strategies.
2020s: Policy-as-code and system design. Records and archival requirements increasingly move into system design: event-driven capture, metadata enforcement, retention automation, and trust frameworks. The documentation strategy evolves into “design by default.”
Today: Documentation as a design principle. Samuels’ vision of mapping functions, actors, and gaps lives on. Now it informs API contracts, user stories, and governance guardrails. What began as archival theory is now embedded in code.
Why It Still Resonates
Samuels’ documentation strategy was ahead of its time. It assumed that archivists had to think beyond the walls of their own institutions, beyond the boundaries of their own collections, and beyond the present moment.
That same mindset is what records professionals and system designers need today. The key is to recognize that documentation does not just “happen.” It must be strategized and designed, whether in acquisition policies or in the architecture of the systems we rely on to run government, business, and community life.
If we take Samuels seriously, then every new system we design is also a documentation strategy in action.
Closing thought:
Documentation strategy began as an archival theory of collection. In our time, it has matured into a design principle for systems. The archivist’s map is now the engineer’s blueprint. The ultimate goal remains the same: to make sure the record of human activity, messy and diverse, survives for the future.