As archives increasingly move into the digital realm, ensuring online accessibility has become a fundamental responsibility. For users who are blind, have low vision, or experience cognitive or motor disabilities, screen readers serve as a vital gateway to digital content. These tools translate onscreen text and interface elements into synthesized speech or Braille, allowing users to navigate websites, databases, and catalogs without relying on visual cues. However, for screen readers to function effectively, digital environments must be designed with intentionality and care. In archival settings, this may be overlooked.
Archives embody the principles of access, stewardship, and service. However, for some users, physical and digital archives remain challenging to navigate, use, or even enter. Barriers to archival access are often unintentional, stemming from outdated facilities, inaccessible technologies, or limited awareness of diverse user needs.
Reference services play a pivotal role in the archival field, acting as a bridge between users and the wealth of information in archival collections.
Ensuring user access to archival materials is essential for fostering research, education, and community engagement. By adopting inclusive practices and innovative strategies, archivists can significantly enhance access to their collections. Improving user access in archives involves creating user-friendly finding aids, digitization, and addressing physical barriers.
Disasters can strike unexpectedly, causing significant damage to archival collections and facilities. Whether it is a flood, fire, or another catastrophic event, the aftermath of a disaster requires a strategic response to assess the damage and initiate recovery efforts.
Archivists have traditionally played a crucial custodial role in protecting and providing access to long-term, historical collections on paper and film, but as the volume and diversity of digital content increases exponentially over the coming decades, digital preservation has become a community effort.
It’s worth exploring the potential benefits that partnerships can bring to archival institutions, especially in terms of digital archives.
For many archival organizations, pursuing partnerships outside their institutions is a practical way to make collections accessible through digitization and digital preservation initiatives. Traversing institutional walls can be an excellent way to learn from the successes and failures of others who have more experience with digital projects, especially if your organization is just getting started with these activities.
It’s worth exploring the potential benefits that partnerships can bring to archival institutions, especially in terms of digital archives.
Changes in an archival project occur frequently and can affect its objectives. For some archival projects, changes are predictable—which allows you to formulate the next actions. If an unanticipated change is significant, seek the advice of the sponsor before taking any action that might alter the project’s direction.
Archival project managers may need to sign contracts with vendors for some project phases or tasks. Reviewing and negotiating contracts is often new territory for archivists, especially for projects which require undertaking new endeavors, developing new skills, and creating unique deliverables.
The type of contract you’re working with will define your budget management behavior. Contracts comprise a statement of work, terms and conditions, deliverables, deadlines, and costs. The three main contract types are: time and materials contracts, cost plus contracts, and fixed price contracts.
Archival projects have a range of costs to contemplate; for example, those that are direct and those that are indirect, those that are labor-related, and those paid to vendors or subcontractors for parts or services. Please read on for definitions and tactics to manage all these types of archival project expenditures.
The authority to begin an archival project is granted in a variety of ways, depending on the type of project. Approval may be in the form of an internal document signed by the sponsor, or an elaborate contract with an external client. Some organizations call this formal authority to advance a “project charter”, but it can also be known as a proposal, project datasheet, project specification, or a project definition document.
