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Photographs (positive and negative), slides, and transparencies taken by the company's photographers to document company activities, products, services, employees at work and at leisure, company exhibits and commemorations, and the response of the company to natural disasters and civil disturbances.

In 1993, Michigan Bell as a corporate entity was subsumed within the Ameritech Corporation. As a by-product of this reorganization and the downsizing resulting from it, the company agreed to deposit with the Bentley Historical Library its extensive archive of photographic images. Totalling approximately one million images, the Michigan Bell Telephone Company photo archive consists of negatives, copy prints, and color transparencies taken in the period since World War II (the bulk beginning in 1949). The collection does not include photos taken since 1983; interspersed throughout, however, are numerous images from before 1949.

The collection has been maintained in the order received with two principal series: Positives and Negatives.

The content of the photographs in the two series varies considerably. Naturally the collection documents the products of the company (phones and other communication devices) and the services provided (e.g. employees at work or the company reacting to a specific customer need). These photos were taken both to inform the general public as accompaniment to press notices and advertising copy and as a communications vehicle within the company, informing employees through the company news publication, Tielines, of activities going on in other divisions of the company or among the various regional Bell offices.

More importantly perhaps, the collection has value for its documentation of events and activities that are common to all large companies. These include images relating to: 1. The activities of employees within the corporation at their work (office workers, repairmen, operators, various support personnel, managers, etc.); 2. The activities of employees outside their work routine as members of corporate social groups (i.e., the company baseball or ice hockey team), at home engaged in leisure time activities, or involved in company-sponsored charitable or public service functions; and 3. Commemorations of specific milestones or events (company parade floats, area office open houses, corporate displays at public events such as fairs, etc.).

In addition, the collection documents the extraordinary and unforeseen as the phone company reacts to events and emergencies not within its control (floods, tornadoes, fires, the 1967 Detroit riot, strikes, and the like) or as a participant in history-making events (the announcement in Ann Arbor of the success of the Salk polio vaccine or the preparation involved in the 1980 Republican National Convention that convened in Detroit).

U. S. Senator from Michigan, 1959-1976, a conscientious supporter of civil rights, consumer protection and environmentalism, Hart served as floor manager of the 1965 civil rights act and 1968 Open Housing Act, introduced legislation to create Sleeping Bear Dunes and Pictured Rock National Lakeshores and sponsored important consumer legislation. Papers include Legislative Files, Staff Files, Press Files, Subject Files, Constituent Correspondence, Office Files, Political Files, Miscellaneous, Sound Recordings, and Visual Materials.

The Philip A. Hart collection consists of those files maintained by Hart and his staff in Washington D.C. while serving as senator from Michigan in the period 1958-1976. A senate office in the 1960s and 1970s could employ as many as thirty staff and clerical workers. In 1975, Hart wrote: "My own office presently consists of 34 full-time people in Washington plus 4 in my Detroit office and one part-time employee each in Grand Rapids and Marquette." Received from Washington, the Hart collection documents the workings of his Capitol office. Excepting for a few files from the 1950s when Hart served in Michigan state government, the Hart papers relate exclusively to Senate activities and detail the variety and bulk of problems crossing the desk of a United States senator and his staff.

In a press release describing his office, Hart stated that the work of a senator falls into three categories: legislative, participating in the discussion and formulation of public policy, and serving as "ambassador" between his constituents and the Federal Government. Beyond the study of legislation, public policy debates, and the relationship between a senator and the people of his state, the Hart collection is a reflection of the times in which Hart served, the sixties and seventies, years of the presidencies of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford, a time when public figures discussed issues of conscience and of war, matters of human rights and of public morality, areas where Hart's basic integrity and humaneness placed him in the forefront of public debate.

The collection falls into eleven principal series: Personal/Biographical, Legislative Files, Staff Files, Press Files, Subject Files, Constituent Correspondence, Office Files, Political Files, Miscellaneous, Sound Recordings, and Visual Materials. Except for Personal/Biographical and the series of audio-visual materials, the Hart collection is an office file and represents the activities of one senator and a dozen or so of his key staff members. To use the collection, the researcher after examining the "Series Description" (on the following pages) should note that for any topical study, information will usually be found in any number of series within the collection. The series represent functional divisions within the Hart office, legislation, press, or whatever. To study an issue such as consumer protection, therefore, the researcher should be prepared to examine the Hart finding aid under the series that might document that topic from different functional perspectives (Legislative Files, Staff Files, Subject Files, among others). The researcher interested in a narrower, more specific topic should recognize that the following inventory, for the most part, is not a folder-level description and thus specialized kinds of information will be filed first under a more general heading.

One more note: The Hart papers originally consisted of more than 700 linear feet of files. Hart himself and his staff had discarded certain types of files before donating them to the library, notably case files and constituent mail answered by form. In addition, the library discarded files of low research content - thank yous, invitations, and carbons of Hart correspondence duplicated in the other principal series of the collection. Furthermore, files containing similar types of correspondence from constituents have been sampled (the folders have "S" or "Samp" on them). Government publications, easily available in a government documents library, and unless heavily annotated, have been discarded. Researchers on any topic within the Hart collection should familiarize themselves with the standard sources on government documents (the indices to the Congressional Record for example). Topics on which Hart played a key legislative role or about which he was keenly interested have not been sampled. These topics include civil rights, the passage of various consumer legislation, the Sleeping Bear Dunes debate, his committee work, and the debate over the war in Vietnam to list a few.