The management of the archival program connects to the hosting institution’s mission; it cannot be an afterthought. Unfortunately, management is an area where archivists traditionally lack experience, but, recently, most LIS programs require students to take at least one management course.
Archivists usually reside in organizations whose primary mission is something else, which can isolate them. Archivists often lack control over matters related to budgets or facilities; they need to be able to find and explain costs so resource allocators can understand them.
In addition, operations and daily practices and procedures often preoccupy archivists. Because there’s usually a lack of resources, keeping the archives functioning and making the collections available becomes more urgent than long-term planning and quality management.
A Coordinated Effort
Coordination depends on the size and nature of the institution, but there’s always a level of service duplication within institutions. Functions such as public relations, procurement, facilities management, and human resources are often centralized. Other duties, more central to the archives, such as IT and conservation, often cross institutional lines. Sometimes there’s also coordination across functional areas, such as when a centralized office manages cataloging outside of the archives. In some institutions, there are multiple archives with differing levels of independence.
In addition, professional boundaries have grown blurry because of the overlap of archives with records management, knowledge management, and IT. Executives making decisions often misunderstand what exactly archivists do, and why their duties are distinct from allied professions.
Placement = Power
The organization’s mission statement should outline the purpose of the archives, and placement will determine that focus and scope.
Proper placement within the organization is essential. Where is the archives department found within the organization’s hierarchy? To whom does the archivist report? Placement begins with differentiating between what occurs within the archives and the larger institution. These lines differ according to the nature of the institution.
For example, within a university setting, the archives can be part of the library, the registrar’s office, the President’s office, or the legal or public relations departments. The library is the most common location, where archives can be part of special collections or exist as a separate unit. Archivists often report to library administrators who may know little about the archives.
Within the government, for instance, the archives could be considered part of the cultural wing, another organizational structure, or part of administrative information services. Some state archives relate to the state library; others are separate agencies. Some report to the Secretary of State.
Staffing and Archival Labor
Surveys of archival repositories show that many archivists work in small departments, with one to three full-time employees. For “lone arrangers,” it becomes clear how difficult it is to run an archives without help. This responsibility makes it important to prioritize, but it also means that archivists often get limited management experience.
Archivists managing multiple staff members face challenges, such as balancing professional and support staff. Academic institutions have categories of support staff, including students. Historical societies and public libraries may have volunteers, which bring their issues.
With multiple staff members, outline reporting structures and responsibilities. The tendency is to assign support staff to the desk and to assign processing responsibilities to non-professional staff, which from a quality point of view is illogical.
Work responsibilities also relate to the separation of functions. Does one person do collection development? Is there a separate reference department, or does everyone sit on the desk? What about dealing with special format materials?
Other staffing issues relate to hiring criteria, professional development, and promotion. Institutions often require the ALA-accredited MLIS. Some places value certification. It’s challenging to get the human resources team to understand the needs for hiring in an archives—where job titles can vary wildly—let alone to offer a competitive wage
Management Done Right
Management assures that everyone has clear responsibilities and enough information and support to conduct assigned tasks. Delegation is crucial. In addition, the department needs regular staff meetings, frequent communication, and written guidelines for staff members and researchers. Over time, the profession has focused more on improving the management and administration of archival departments, which will make them more functional, more initiative-taking, and more responsive to contemporary research needs.
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.