Margaret Cross Norton: A Biographical Analysis

Margaret Cross Norton is a fascinating woman whose ideas and work was instrumental in building the archival profession as it is known today. A leader in the archival field Norton had clear ideas of how the profession should develop. Norton’s three passions were creating an archival profession, records management and archival education standards. The bibliography will focus on Norton’s influence on these three topics and how it informs the archival field today.

Part One: Overview and Biographical
Illinois State Archives. (n.d.). Margaret Cross Norton: A Biographical Sketch. Retrieved October 5, 2015, from https://www.cyberdriveillinois.com/departments/archives/nortonbio.html. This article gives a brief overview of the woman who was Margaret

She starts off by admonishing the SAA. She used the speech’s introduction to highlight areas the SAA is failing, and she gives some ideas on how the SAA can do better. She then launches into her true topic, legal aspects of archives. She said archivists need to do more research on the philosophical aspects of legal records. She highlights different issues involved with the legal aspects of archives, these include: The disposal of legal records, making sure anyone who applies to see a public record can get access to it, creating a more efficient way of collecting the papers of outgoing politicians and using records from the archives as court evidence. She believed archivists have as much of a duty to gather and protect current documents as they do to protect historical manuscripts. She used the speech to highlight the different ways to handle legal records in court. She ends the speech encouraging her colleagues to think and study on the benefit for the use of current records in a court setting. In other words she was stating the value of records management. This article does a good job of identifying the issues archivists faced at the start of the SAA. Norton uses her presidential address to talk about issues important to her, and a researcher will find useful information pertaining to how and why the archival field developed into what it

The article goes into detail of the struggles of women as they tried to find footing in the early days of the Society of American Archivists. The article talks about various prominent women in the early days of the SAA; the article implies one woman, Margret Cross Norton, was the most influential of the women who founded the SAA. It is clear from the article she was a leader in the SAA and the most prominent mother of the founding mothers. This article also talks about the trials of women in the archival profession from the start of the SAA to when women really started to dominate the field in the seventies. The article has good charts and graphs that show a change over time of the number of women who entered the archival profession from the late 1930s to the early