2026 NAAM Conference - Reimagining the Road Ahead

Automotive history and its stories are not told only through cars, but also through the automobilia and ephemera that accompany over a century of industrial and technological history. Thus, automotive archives and special collections hold a multitude of materials and media, each unique. This variegated approach to collecting is common in automotive museums and requires a wide range of resources, skills, and knowledge.

Automotive museums also differ in that their main artifacts are large vehicles that demand significant resources. This often leaves archives and non-vehicle collections without the required preservation and organization. The need for a professional and standalone archivist and archives department is often overlooked, even at some of the nation’s most well-regarded automotive museums. When your collections encompass everything in the museum that is not a car, it can be difficult, costly, and overwhelming to organize these differing materials and create the ideal conditions, standards, and procedures. Furthermore, these archives contain materials, metadata, and historical topics not often addressed by mainstream archival and museum standards.

This case study presentation will tell the story of two archivists tasked with organizing, preserving, standardizing, and making accessible 11,500 square feet of material collected over twenty years before they came on board. Before them, there was no professional archivist or collections management for these materials, and they were expected to build an archive from the ground up with little to no funding.

The Petersen’s archivists will examine their last nine years of archives management, including the decisions they made, their rationale, the problems encountered, solutions attempted, and mistakes often made. This session will touch on topics such as grant writing, building and storage issues, collections policy and management, digitization, environmental challenges, and staffing. The goal of this presentation is to demonstrate that, regardless of your museum's size, 1resources, or experience, all automotive archives face extreme challenges and that there are creative ways to meet them.