Preservation of Texas’s Public Records, a Vital Work in Progress

Management of state and local records has a long history in the United States and in Texas, where interest in the varieties of information embedded in government documents became a matter of public investigation and funding in the 1920s. This article, written in honor of David B. Gracy II, one of the most ardent advocates of the intrinsic value of such records, describes efforts to preserve local government documents and enumerates the ways in which their uses have intensified since the mid-twentieth century.