People are fundamental to every aspect of an archival project. They commission projects, provide resources, support (or challenge) projects, and produce results. People deliver projects as managers and team members, and others influence projects as sponsors and archival project stakeholders. How people behave and feel about the project influences its success.
Who is an Archival Project Stakeholder?
A stakeholder has an interest in a project’s outcome. Although the users and the sponsor are the most important people to please, a project is considered successful if it satisfies most, if not all, stakeholders.
Stakeholders influence a project throughout its life cycle and contribute to its success. During planning, they help in defining objectives, requirements, and constraints; identify strategies; and provide funding. During implementation, stakeholders do the work, resolve issues, decide whether changes are necessary, and control the budget.
Stakeholder management is important for successful archival projects. To identify stakeholders, pay attention to the individuals who will be affected by the project’s outcomes: the contributors of resources—including people, space, time, tools, and money—and the beneficiaries of the project’s output. Each is a stakeholder in the project.
Types of Stakeholders
In archival projects, users are stakeholders. They are the recipients of the project deliverables.
As stakeholders, functional managers are not necessarily affiliated with a project team, nor are they involved in the everyday management of the project. Functional managers are resource providers for the team and can affect the project’s success.
Another type of stakeholder is a subject matter expert. They are authorities having specialized knowledge on certain aspects of the project. Subject matter experts supply advice to projects on an as-needed basis. They ensure that the teams that they work with gain the information and insight needed to get the job done. Subject matter experts can span projects, allowing them to share knowledge across a multitude of efforts.
The Role of the Sponsor
As senior executives, project sponsors shepherd projects to success. The sponsor champions the benefits of the project, accepts responsibility for funding and budget statuses, concurs with the project requirements, and is knowledgeable about planned and actual results. They assist their teams in resolving organizational impediments to success. They work with project managers to ensure a smooth transition from project start to completion. Experienced project managers aim to provide executive involvement by forging relationships with their sponsors. There is little a project manager won’t share with her or his project sponsor. In turn, by addressing challenging project issues and concerns as they arise, sponsors hedge risk and improve outcomes.
Stakeholder Management in Large Projects
For complex projects like the building or renovation of an archives facility, several project teams may be formed to move the process forward. Representatives from the governing authority, the board of trustees, the administration and staff, friends groups, and community interest groups may be part of this collective.
Usually, a smaller working group is formed within the larger group of stakeholders to hasten the process, and their decisions are brought back to the larger group for review and approval. It’s vital that only one person—usually the project manager—speaks for the entire organization in dealing with consultants and contractors during the design and building process.
Power Dynamics
Stakeholder relationships are functional rather than hierarchical. Although the sponsor will be higher-ranking than the project manager, little else can be assumed about the seniority of other team members. Subject matter experts or technical specialists have skills based on years of experience and are often senior to the project manager.
For effective stakeholder management, the project manager must consider the stakeholders’ attitudes toward the project, their influence on the organization, and their authority levels. Understanding a stakeholder’s stance can help the project manager gather requirements and manage the stakeholder more effectively.
Stakeholders make or break projects. Some have concerns but no power. Others may be supportive but lack rank. The opposite is also true: important individuals may be the champions or naysayers for the archival project. Project managers need to know whom they can trust for support, but they also want to know who may cause them to lose traction. In my experience as an archivist and consultant, I’ve seen ill-planned projects forge ahead because of executive support. I’ve also seen them torpedoed by low-ranking employees with high political power.
Keep Up with Stakeholder Changes
In the course of a project, key archival project stakeholders who are supporters or antagonists may change, and understanding their attitudes and interests is essential in continuing a project. Effective stakeholder management requires the project manager to create a strategy that can keep up with these changes and also satisfies those with high power within the organization.
The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog.
Archives often operate in environments defined by scarcity of space, staff, time, and funding. In these conditions, every decision carries weight. Without a plan, archives risk spreading their resources too thin, responding only to immediate crises, and missing opportunities for growth and impact. Strategic planning serves as a lifeline, providing archivists with a structured approach to prioritize, allocate resources, and communicate the value of their work to stakeholders.
Archivists have long recognized patterns of limited funding that shape their institutions, yet they have consistently responded with creativity, commitment, and innovation. Even when resources are scarce, archives continue to find ways to build and maintain essential infrastructure and strengthen public engagement. Each challenge underscores the importance of archivists’ labor and provides an opportunity to advocate for the central role archives play in their communities.
Archives safeguard treasures, including objects like the founding documents of a nation and photographs of defining cultural moments. These holdings inspire a sense of connection to the past, and at the heart of that work are archivists whose expertise brings these collections to life.
No archives is an island. Especially in resource-constrained environments, collaboration through shared infrastructure provides a lifeline. Consortia models turn scarcity into opportunity by spreading costs and expertise across multiple archives. By pooling resources, institutions achieve more than they could alone.
Well-resourced institutions have developed archival best practices, including comprehensive finding aids, climate-controlled storage, and digital preservation systems. For small or resource-constrained archives, these standards can feel out of reach. The danger is that the profession’s ideals may discourage institutions from taking action, leaving records vulnerable. The solution lies in paring down practices and procedures without abandoning principles.
Many archives exist within environments of chronic underfunding. Community archives, small historical societies, or lone arrangers may work with little more than donated materials, a handful of volunteers, and minimal budgets.
However, these institutions remain vital, safeguarding the histories of communities often absent from mainstream narratives. Scarcity shapes their reality, yet it can still allow meaningful work.
Humanity produces more digital content than at any other point in history. Every click, message, and post contributes to an expanding universe of data that represents the cultural memory of our time. At the center of this transformation stand archivists, the professionals uniquely trained to ensure that memories survive in the future. However, even as the scale of the challenge grows, their voices risk being sidelined in public conversations about digital preservation.
In recent years, the concept of “slow librarianship” has emerged as a thoughtful response to the accelerating pace and pressures placed upon library professionals. Drawing inspiration from the broader slow movement, it emphasizes care, reflection, ethics, and people-centered work over speed and efficiency.
The archival profession is characterized by dedication to public memory, cultural preservation, and service. However, beneath this noble mission lies a troubling reality: the increasing reliance on gig and contract labor.
Written documents have long occupied a privileged position in archives as the most authoritative memory source. However, this excludes vast repositories of knowledge that reside outside the written word, especially within Indigenous communities, where memory is often preserved and transmitted through oral traditions, performance, storytelling, ceremony, and embodied practices.
Archival description is often treated as a neutral or technical task: summarizing contents, assigning subject headings, and organizing metadata for retrieval. However, description is actually far from neutral. It shapes how users interpret records, which narratives are centered, and whose voices are made visible or erased.
As the archival profession reckons with the legacies of colonialism, more institutions and practitioners are turning toward Indigenous and decolonial approaches that reframe traditional archival practice. Central to this shift is recognizing cultural protocols and community-defined rules governing how knowledge is created, shared, accessed, and preserved. Cultural protocols are foundational to ethical, respectful, and reciprocal relationships between archives and Indigenous communities.
In recent decades, Indigenous communities and archivists have challenged the dominant frameworks that have long shaped archival practice. Traditionally, Western archival models have prioritized state authority, institutional control, and the presumption of neutrality. These models often fail to reflect Indigenous worldviews, community needs, or the rights of Indigenous peoples over their records and heritage.
As archival practice shifts to meet the challenges of the digital age, the ethical use of born-digital materials has become one of the most pressing concerns for archivists. These materials—emails, websites, text messages, digital photographs, spreadsheets, social media posts, and more—are created and stored digitally from their inception.
The fundamental principles of archival preservation focus on the agents of deterioration, preventive conservation, and essential preservation strategies applied in archival settings.
The monetary appraisal of archives and manuscripts is a critical yet underexplored intersection of library science and financial valuation. This article addresses the persistent knowledge gap between archival assessment and fiscal valuation and provides an overview of the monetary appraisal process in the United States. It focuses on concluding the fair market value (FMV) of noncash charitable contributions, a process governed by Internal Revenue Service (IRS) regulations and the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (USPAP). By documenting practices and terminology, the article serves as a resource for archivists navigating the complexities of donor relations and institutional stewardship. It advocates for increased fiscal literacy within the archival profession, suggesting that an integrated understanding of market dynamics and stewardship costs is essential for the care and financial substantiation of collections.
Proper archival storage is one of the most critical aspects of archival preservation. In addition to housing collections in a dedicated archival storage room, using suitable storage materials and enclosures helps protect archival collections from environmental damage, physical wear, and chemical deterioration.
One of the core challenges archivists face is determining the appropriate description level for materials in their collections. From broad collection-level overviews to granular item-level details, descriptive hierarchies play a crucial role in conveying the context and structure of archival materials.
Description is a cornerstone of archival practice, providing the means for users and archivists to understand, access, and interpret materials.
Mixed-media archives, which contain physical and digital records, present unique challenges for archival arrangement. These collections require archivists to develop strategies that address the different needs of physical and digital materials while maintaining the collection’s coherence and accessibility.
Digital records have introduced new challenges to traditional archival arrangement practices. While the principles of original order and provenance remain relevant, the nature of digital materials requires archivists to adapt these principles to new formats and technologies.
Archival arrangement organizes and structures archival materials to ensure efficient management, access, and preservation.
Redaction in archival work—obscuring or removing sensitive information from records—has become a central concern in contemporary archival ethics. As archives increasingly acquire born-digital records and digitize historical collections for online access, archivists must grapple with data privacy, access, transparency, and potential harm.
Archives have traditionally focused on preserving historical records, ensuring access, and maintaining the integrity of collections. However, in the digital age, the moral responsibilities of archivists have grown more complex.
Archives have long been viewed as bastions of memory, preservation, and historical accountability. However, archivists must confront ethical questions in an era of digital surveillance, data harvesting, and global information flows.
As archival institutions evolve from custodians of information to facilitators of memory and meaning-making, emotional engagement has become a vital, though often overlooked, dimension of archival design.
Archival reading rooms have long been the centerpiece of public access to collections. They are where researchers engage with historical documents, where discovery becomes tangible, and where the institutional identity of an archives is most visibly embodied.
Archival discovery tools, such as catalogs, finding aids, search interfaces, and digital repositories, are often the first point of contact between users and collections. These tools serve as maps and compasses, guiding users through vast and often complex holdings.
Design thinking has become a widely adopted approach in fields ranging from technology to education, prized for emphasizing empathy, experimentation, and iterative problem-solving. For archives, traditionally shaped around internal workflows and professional conventions, design thinking presents an opportunity to reimagine outreach and engagement strategies from users’ perspectives.
With shrinking resources and increasing demands, archivists cannot afford to view budgeting as an afterthought. A carefully developed budget is a strategic tool that connects an archives’ mission to its daily operations. It demonstrates accountability, supports advocacy efforts, and provides a framework for decision-making.