public archives
Government document repository
Public archives are repositories where government records and historical documents are preserved and made accessible to citizens.
These include birth certificates, property deeds, court records, legislative proceedings, and official correspondence.
Unlike private archives, public archives operate under transparency principles—citizens generally have legal rights to access their contents.
The historian spent months in the public archives researching colonial land grants.
- retention schedulesWhen to discard documents
- record keepingMaintaining organized records
- deedsActions or legal titles
- birth certificatesDocuments proving nativity
- catalogingSystematic organization into records
special collections · manuscripts · oral histories · family trees · provenance · metadata · FOIA requests · census data · artifacts · classification systems · charters · reading room · historical societies · freedom of information · national memory · primary sources · digitization · microfilm
public archivessecret archives
public archivesprivate collections
Privately owned gathered items
personal papers · family archives · private libraries · business records · personal collections