Help us preserve the history of Indiana sites and structures and the legacy of Hoosier architects, landscape architects, planners, builders and engineers. Too much of our built environment is being demolished.  Too much of its record is lost in trashcans, paper shredders, hot attics, leaky basements, and with the delete button. The Drawings and Documents Archive offers a better alternative. Using standard archival appraisal methods, the Archive selects materials for preservation that will provide opportunities for study and use by future generations. But we can't do it without your support.

Those drawings, sketcheds and photographs in your office could be the raw material that will help a student finish their dissertation, or serve as the basis for a restoration or revitalization project. Those records of the firm that your father belonged to for so many years could provide the missing information for a researcher writing an organizational history or studying the impact of redevelopment. The Drawings and Documents Archive will preserve them and make them available for future uses that none of us may be able to imagine today. You can make it happen by donating to the Archive.

Donating to the Archive

The mission of the Archive is to collect, preserve and provide access to records of historic sites and structures in Indiana and the work of Indiana environmental design practitioners (architects, landscape architects, planners, engineers, contractors, fabricators, and builders). Our goal, in cooperation with other repositories, is the preservation and dissemination of information about the history of Indiana's built environment.

In principle, we are interested in documents of all kinds, including, but not limited to:

• job lists;
• scrapbooks and scrapbook material;
• promotional brochures;
• office records;
• correspondence (especially correspondence regarding questions of design and client relations);
• preliminary and presentation drawings, renderings, working drawings;
• shop drawings;
• specifications;
• photographs;
• slides;
• models; and
• audio-visual materials
  

For more specific information on the focus and scope of our collections, please consult our DDA Accessions Policy (.pdf).

If you have materials that you would like to donate to the Archive, or you would like to support the Archives' mission through financial means, please contact us at ddarchive@bsu.edu or (765) 285-8441.