Considering the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Virtual Museum among the Array of Online Resources for Items of Accounting History Significance

ABSTRACT This paper describes the contents of the Securities and Exchange Commission Historical Society’s virtual museum, which includes nearly 8,000 primary source research artifacts, such as scans or transcriptions of original documents, sound recordings, and videos, from the 1790s to the 2020s. This paper identifies, classifies, and summarizes close to 700 of these items found to be of accounting research significance and discusses selected items of special interest to accounting history researchers. Examples include documents related to early authoritative standards, professional guidance, reports on forensic accounting investigations, and multimedia related to biographies of prominent accountants and the evolution of the accounting profession. The virtual museum is compared and contrasted with other online resources available to accounting historians. Thus, this paper points accounting educators and researchers to primary sources to inform their pedagogy and scholarship, responding to the Accounting Historians Journal (AHJ) 2024 Call for Papers on accounting history research resources.