Tacoma Community College Library: Tacoma Community College Archives: Transfers and Donations

What We're Looking For

The archives collects the college history as well as topics in the broader Tacoma area, and the bulk dates from the 1960s to the present. The archives holds a broad range of administrative documentation from offices such as the President, Marketing, Athletics; school publications such as The Challenge and The Bulletin; and a large collection of photographs.

The archives is actively seeking to expand its collection on student culture and activities, the work of student clubs, oral histories, and beginning a collection of born-digital documentation of student work and resources. The archives continues also to document the school’s administration and community, while focusing on individuals, events, and initiatives that reflect the school’s mission. This focus includes equity, diversity, and inclusion work; creative works produced within the campus community; materials demonstrating social engagement or change; and the ways TCC engages with the greater community.

Transfer Process

The TCC Archives is accepting new donations and transfers of materials from all members of the TCC community, including faculty, staff, students, alumni, and community partners. Please reach out to the Archivist at archives@tacomacc.edu to start a conversation.

The Archivist may decide immediately that the materials are a good fit for the collection, or may request to make a site visit to your office to go through the materials to assess their fit in the collection, or ask for a sampling of digital files to be shared to make this determination. Even if your materials are determined to not be a fit for our small collection, the Archivist will provide information on other good homes for them.

Filling out the Deed of Gift is an important step in transferring your materials to the Archives. This allows the TCC Archives to take official custody of the materials, have permission to digitize items and make them accessible to Archives users, track the history and context of creation and ownership of the materials, and have clear guidelines on what to do with records if anything is determined to be out of scope, damaged, or otherwise in need of removal from the collection.

If you have materials you know that the TCC Archives is interested in preserving but don't want to part with them permanently, talk to the Archivist about lending the materials for digitization. The Archivist can make archival-quality digital surrogates of your records (depending on their format/genre) then return the originals to you.

Once the TCC Archives has taken custody of the records, they are "accessioned" - that is, added to the Archives' collection by creating a preliminary description and unique identifier for the materials in our collections database. The materials will then be further arranged and described as a distinct collection or added to existing collections as appropriate. This final step of processing may not be immediate due to the limited staffing of the Archives, but the materials will still be available for research use unless otherwise noted in the Deed of Gift.