A unique challenge arises in the intricate world of archives—the risk of archivists being perceived as self-promoters.
In archives, leadership is not merely a role but a proactive stance transcending the archival domain’s boundaries.
Digital preservation is crucial to safeguarding cultural and historical heritage for future generations.
Archivists play a crucial role in safeguarding the past and extracting valuable insights using cutting-edge technology.
The Society of American Archives defines reappraisal as “the process of identifying materials that no longer merit preservation and that are candidates for deaccessioning”. Archivists continue to seek ways to accomplish responsible reappraisal and deaccessioning.
There are numerous articles, case studies, policies, and conference sessions on reappraisal and deaccessioning, yet despite the increasing amount of information, these practices remain controversial.
Along with reference and access, archivists perform several public service activities to bring collections to interested researchers. For novice users, archival repositories can be intimidating, with rules and policies which may not at first make sense. Helping patrons find archival holdings relevant to their search includes a review of a number of service responsibilities.
Reference and access, two important areas of public services, are tied to all the activities that archivists perform.
Archivists prepare materials for use according to archival theory and practice; they treat materials like aggregates, arrange and describe them, and make finding aids. Archivists provide initial access through these surrogates, rather than sending researchers to the stacks to browse through the collections. Instead, archivists search within the descriptive tools themselves.
Archives exist to be used by researchers. Access is a set of activities that links primary source materials to the public. Archivists should be able to answer questions about specific collections, such as their sizes, date ranges, the existence of correspondence by individuals, research restrictions, and copyright status, among other issues.
An acute preservation challenge lies in saving digital items. Technology enables us to create, use, and be enriched by information in ways that were unthinkable generations ago. But the same advances that make sharing information so easy also pose some problems. The complexity and diversity of technology is overwhelming, even as storage capacity becomes cheaper. The volume of digital data, unstable storage media, and obsolete hardware and software make the usability of digital items a challenge.
A finding aid is a term used by archivists to describe the various kinds of written descriptions they produce about collections. An aid can be any descriptive tool: published or unpublished, manual or electronic, produced by the creator, the records management program, or the archival repository.
These guides were captured on paper for years, then were created in Word and Excel documents. Now, they’re frequently encoded using Encoded Archival Description (EAD), a standardized system that allows users to find primary sources more easily.
