Archivist
An archivist is an information professional who assesses, collects, organizes, preserves, maintains control over, and provides access to records and archives determined to have long-term value.
Archivists must also select records valuable enough to justify the costs of storage and preservation, plus the labor-intensive expenses of arrangement, description, and reference service.
In general, the librarian tends to deal with published media (where the metadata, such as author, title, and date of publication, may be readily apparent and can be presented in standardized form), whereas the archivist deals with unpublished media (which has different challenges such as the metadata not always being immediately apparent, containing complications and variety, and more likely to depend on provenance).
Archivists' duties include acquiring and appraising new collections, arranging and describing records, providing reference service, and preserving materials.
Archivists process the records physically by placing them in acid-free folders and boxes to ensure their long-term survival.
[9] Archivists' work encompasses a range of ethical decisions that may be thought of as falling into three broad and intertwined areas: legal requirements; professional standards; and accountability to society in selecting and preserving documentary materials that serve as a primary source of knowledge, and influence collective memory and identity.
[13] Alongside their work in arranging and caring for collections, archivists assist users in interpreting materials and answering inquiries.
[14] Archivists work for a variety of organizations, including government agencies, local authorities, museums, hospitals, historical societies, businesses, charities, corporations, colleges and universities, national parks and historic sites, and any institution whose records may potentially be valuable to researchers, exhibitors, genealogists, or others.
Archivists employed at cultural institutions or for local government frequently design educational or outreach programs to further the ability of archive users to understand and access information in their collections.
[21] The advent of Encoded Archival Description (EAD), along with increasing demand for materials to be made available online, has required archivists to become more tech-savvy in the past decade.
Many archivists are now acquiring basic XML skills in order to make their finding aids available to researchers online.
[52] Students are expected to have relevant paid or voluntary work experience before obtaining a place on the UK courses, while professional certification (after qualifying) can be pursued via the Registration Scheme offered by the Archives and Records Association.
[54] In 2002, the Society of American Archivists published Guidelines for a Graduate Program in Archival Studies;[55] it also promotes and disseminates a code of ethics,[56] which has undergone several revisions since it was first adopted in 1980.
[57] When first established in 1989, some critics of ACA certification objected to its annual membership fees, the theoretical versus practical nature of its tests, and the need for members to re-certify every five years.
In addition to formal degrees and or apprenticeships, many archivists take part in continuing education opportunities as available through professional associations and library school programs.
New discoveries in the fields of media preservation and emerging technologies require continuing education as part of an archivist's job in order to stay current in the profession.
[63] In 1898, three Dutch archivists, Samuel Muller, Johan Feith, and Robert Fruin, published the Handleiding voor het ordenen en beschrijven van archieven (Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives).
Notably, within these rules, the principle of preserving provenance and original order was first argued for as an essential trait of archival arrangement and description.
[64] Many of these principles were subsequently adopted and developed by the British archivist Hilary Jenkinson in his Manual of Archive Administration, first published in 1922, with a revised edition appearing in 1937.
Schellenberg's work was intended to be an academic textbook defining archival methodology and giving archivists specific technical instruction on workflow and arrangement.
His primary (administrative) and secondary (research) value model for the management and appraisal of records and archives allowed government archivists greater control over the influx of material that they faced after the Second World War.
As a result of the widespread adoption of Schellenberg's methods, especially in the United States of America, modern Records Management as a separate but related discipline was born.
Archives 2.0, by extension, is more of a participatory online repository than a true-to-form established entity, although it has fallen considerably behind Web 2.0 in overall acceptance by archivists themselves.
