The purpose of this paper is to define architecture for organizational memory systems in institutions of higher education. The aim arose from the identified problem, where the constructions of knowledge management systems are being handled in a rapid prototyping approach. In the rapid prototyping approach the acquired knowledge was encoded directly into an iteratively developed computer system and provides early versions of the system, however it's difficult to manage and maintain the final system. Furthermore, a state of the art survey identified few organizational memories studies in institutions of higher education despite being a natural place for research and knowledge management. This work proposes architecture for organizational memory that is based on CESM model and CommonKADS methodology; this architecture is concerned with the knowledge representation for semantic search of documents. Furthermore, a systematic review of the state of the art was performed to support the design of the architecture and compare the proposed architecture with the proposed architectures in the academic community.