This essay reviews the experiences of Duke University's Special Collections Library in building major collections of advertising agency and trade organization archives. Duke has acquired extensive records of several still-existing agencies and organizations and has agreed contractually to service the collections for the records creators' business needs as well as to make large parts of the collections available for academic and general users. The author describes the agreements made with donors, the experiences of an out-of-house repository trying to build the collections, the management of a fee-based information service for business users, and outreach to the scholarly community. The efforts at Duke have been extremely successful, but not without pitfalls and opportunities to "learn the hard way".

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