When evaluating your organization's records, it is important to consider the following questions:
Does this record impact the understanding of your organization, its work, and its role within the MIT community?
Would this record be of interest to future organization members, students or researchers?
Does this record relate to other documents your organization knows it will maintain?
If the answer is yes to any of these questions, then it should be considered for retention. As you are reviewing your organization's records, remember: When in doubt, don't throw it out! Keep the record and contact the Institute Archivist for guidance on identifying records that should be retained for historical or organizational value.
These are types of records and materials that your student organization might create which would be great to preserve.
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The Institute Archives is interested in acquiring not only your organization’s paper records but also your organization’s digital records. These records might include email, listserv archives, spreadsheets, databases, PDFs, Word processing files. Records may also include publicly available web presences such as websites, photographs, sound recordings, and video. (NOTE: The Institute Archives can collect password-protected sites if provided the password.)
The Institute Archives collects materials related to the activities of MIT, and to that end, we selectively add web and social media content to our collections that will appear in the general records schedule and that fit into collecting policies. Social media may include services such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The following general principles guide our collecting decisions.