Preserving legacy: The development of the design workshop archives and digital collection at Utah State University

The Design Workshop Archives and Digital Collection offer a unique opportunity for analysis of the archival process for landscape architecture collections. The goal of this project was to analyze the format of landscape architecture archive collections and design protocol for the creation of the Design Workshop Archives and Digital Collection. A review of best practices and experimentation has guided the appraisal and accessioning of four of Design Workshop's Legacy Projects. The integration of a digital collection gathered from physical drawings, paper manuscripts, and computer files offers unique opportunities to establish standards and procedures for the creation of an archive at a university campus. The collaboration of professionals, archivists, and landscape architecture staff to create the archives has proven to be useful in many ways. The result is a manual composed of a review of best practices along with an account of the accessioning process undertaken in the creation of this new collection. Scholarly review of the archives evidenced the need for an altered approach to the archiving process in order to support the creation of the digital collection and the quantity of project material. Additional measures were created to appropriately represent and preserve the unique visual components of the works.