Surveying Archivists and Their Work toward Advocacy and Management, or “Enterprise Archiving”

Abstract

Archivists ensure preservation of and access to permanently valuable records in the course of their everyday work. We present results from a spring 2014 survey that sought to gather data on the work archivists do, competencies required for this work, and archivists' recommendations for graduate curricula in archival studies. Our research questions sought to measure or describe a) the nature of everyday archival work, b) the frequency of specific interactive and materials-based tasks, c) the greatest challenges of the archivist's work, and d) recommendations for further emphasis in graduate archival education. We targeted the survey strategically to professional archivists as well as to graduates of a master's program in information studies and obtained 490 responses. Much of the communication that archivists must do is "enterprise archiving," which centers around advocating for the value of well-managed archives. Recognizing prior efforts to raise awareness of professional demographics and skills used on the job, we present our work as a continuation of initiatives aiming to transform data gathered about our activities and competencies into broader public support for archives and archivists.

Regimes of participation: theorising participatory archives from the outset of archivists' views on archival institutions and user participation in Scandinavia

“…In broad terms this aligns with the earlier observations on how archivists' perception of their role has broadened (e.g. Kallberg, 2012;Huvila, 2012;Huvila, 2016;Buchanan et al, 2017), shifted towards becoming more proactive (Borglund, 2015) and oriented towards guiding users, rather than acting as experts (cf. Duff and Fox, 2006).…”

“…However, the need to cope with the escalation of the quantity of digital records, together with increasing demands for accountability and societal transparency demand robust and reliable means to preserve archival records for administrative and evidentiary purposes (Kallberg, 2012). This underlines the continuing relevance of archival management competencies (Buchanan et al, 2017) and the significance of records and fonds as a cornerstone of archives and archival practice (Edquist et al, 2022). Perhaps unsurprisingly, long-term preservation is also repeatedly emphasised by archivists as a key raison d'être of archival institutions (Audunson et al, 2019).…”