Heritage Protocol at Florida State University

The mission of the Florida State University Heritage Protocol program is to identify, acquire, catalog, and preserve items related to the institutional history and cultural heritage of Florida State University (FSU) and its predecessor institutions. FSU Heritage Protocol was established by alumni, current and former faculty and staff, and friends of the university who wanted the school to do more to document and preserve its history. Jointly sponsored by the Alumni Association, University Relations, and University Libraries, it functions as a unique hybrid archival entity, serving as a public relations tool for each of those three units, as well as for the FSU Foundation and various academic departments, schools, and colleges. Hired in 2007, the Heritage Protocol Archivist was given the latitude to adopt some of the recent trends in outreach, collection development, and access and usage, all of which served to redefine the role of the traditional university archivist to some extent. This article chronicles the first 6 years of the archives, including the implementation of some of those new initiatives, as well as its attempts to refocus collection development with an emphasis toward alumni and their memorabilia in an effort to document the student experience at the school. This new emphasis has the added value of getting alumni involved and invested in the program and ultimately making them stakeholders in its overall success.