Mission Statement
The Head of the University Archives bears the responsibility for the collection and maintenance of the official records and papers of the University as well as other documents of enduring historical value.
The University Archives collects, preserves, and makes accessible the official records of the University of Notre Dame. This historically valuable material documents the academic and administrative responsibilities of the University as well as the experiences of its students, alumni, officers, faculty, staff, and benefactors.
In addition, the University Archives, through its records management program, provides record retention and retrieval services to campus offices. This program ensures that historically valuable records are identified for permanent retention in the Archives and that documents with no historical significance are appropriately destroyed after there is no continuing administrative, fiscal, or legal need for their retention.
The Archives also collects and maintains records, papers, photographs, printed material, and audio-visual material that document the life of the Catholic Church and her people as lived in the American context, and is recognized as one of the nation's foremost archival repositories for the study of American Catholicism. The Archives has collected these materials since the nineteenth century, and the availability of these important scholarly resources at Notre Dame is a major contribution to the academic mission of the University.
How to Use this Website
The website is divided into ten major sections. You are currently in the About the Archives section, which contains general information about the Archives and our policies and procedures.
Information for Researchers: This section provides necessary information regarding Archives' history, fees, and services. It is helpful whether you are visiting the Archives in person or requesting information from home.
About Our Collections: General descriptions of the different types of material in the Archives can be found here. If you are interested in University records, Catholic historical manuscript collections, photographs, audio/visual material, or printed material, you should seek additional information and links to the search pages here.
Search Our Collections: From this page you can perform a search across all of the Archives' online finding aids and also search unique individual databases, such as an index to early Notre Dame students from 1849 to 1912.
Records Management: This section is intended for University departments only and contains information for faculty and staff on how to manage records.
Research Resources: This section provides documents, online exhibits, statistics, full text publications, and links useful to many of the topics that may be of interest to researchers.
Digital Collections: This section includes links to many digitized Notre Dame publications -- including student magazines and newspapers, alumni journals, football reviews, and others -- and to two of our manuscript collections, the Records of the Diocese of Louisiana and the Floridas and the William Tecumseh Sherman Family Papers.
News and Notes The archives blog presents stories and photographs from the history of Notre Dame with links to inventories of source material in the archives.
Site Map This section presents an overview of the contents of our website with links to its various components.
Contact Us This section lists the archives' staff and gives the mailing address, phone number, email address, and hours of operation of the archives along with email addresses of individual archivists.
This page was last updated April 2, 2020