Information for Donors

If you are interested in donating materials to the Archive, please contact us through our material donation form, , or postal mail. If you have a large number of items to donate, please contact us to make arrangements concerning the delivery of the materials to the Archive. Currently, for digital materials, our only means of accepting donations is through mail deliveries of digital records on storage media such as flash drives or external hard drives. It is against our policy to return any storage media that we receive from donors. Materials can be sent to our mailing address. Once the new AMAW portal is completed, donors will be able to directly upload digital material to the Archive online.

Once materials are received at the Archive, they will be accessioned and you will be sent a deed of gift. By completing and signing the deed of gift, you acknowledge that any digital material that you donate to the Archive will be made accessible to researchers online. Digital materials of a particularly sensitive nature may be redacted and/or restricted to onsite access at the discretion of the Archivist. You will also have the opportunity to communicate to Archive staff any reasonable restrictions that you wish to place on the materials in your donation.

After receiving a signed deed of gift, Archive staff will then process the materials. For physical materials, this includes preservation treatment, housing materials in acid free sleeves, folders and boxes, as well as any necessary conservation work which would help to prolong the life of the materials. For digital materials, this includes creating access and preservation copies of material, generating checksums and other technical metadata, and migrating files to archival formats. All items donated to the Archive will be placed into a collection in the donor's, creator's or organization's name.

Once the collection is processed, a finding aid will be created. The finding aid is essentially an inventory and description of the contents of the collection, and also usually includes a brief biographical summary and information regarding the donor. Along with a deed of gift, new donors to the Archive will receive a questionnaire used to collect basic biographical information for the finding aid. The finding aid helps researchers locate information they are interested in within your collection.

Physical materials will be housed in a climate controlled environment designed to extend the lives of archival materials. Digital materials will be housed on secure servers. Once materials arrive at the Archive, they cannot be removed. Researchers must be present to view physical materials, while digital materials will be made available online through the AMAW portal.

For more information regarding the Archive of Modern American Warfare, including which materials are not accepted by the Archive, please consult our Collection Development Policy.