Archival Management
Margot Note
Prioritizing Screen Reader Access

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.

Prioritizing Screen Reader Access
Archival Management
Margot Note
How to Design Inclusive Archives

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 Barriers to archival access are often unintentional, stemming from outdated facilities, inaccessible technologies, or limited awareness of diverse user needs.   

How to Design Inclusive Archives
Archival Management
Margot Note
How to Empower Archives Users Through Effective ...

Reference services play a pivotal role in the archival field, acting as a bridge between users and the wealth of information in archival collections.

How to Empower Archives Users Through Effective Reference Services
Archival Management
Margot Note
How to Improve User Access to Archival Materials

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. 

How to Improve User Access to Archival Materials
Archival Management
Margot Note
Post-Disaster Recovery in Archives

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.  

Post-Disaster Recovery in Archives

Archival Description and Cataloging

Archival Description and Cataloging

Archival description, primarily, is a way to bring order to the chaos of unprocessed records of enduring value.

Description is not just what archivists do to an individual collection. Description begins when the collection first comes into a repository—when archivists accession collections into a repository’s recordkeeping system. Archival description is incremental and progressive, and proceeds in a continuum. As archivists work further on a collection, they can provide more detailed and comprehensive information. Archivists are also able to provide a broader range of access points, both local and remote.

Change and Continuity with Analog and Digital Records

Change and Continuity with Analog and Digital Records

Two major events affecting archives and records management have occurred. The basic principles, while still valid, need to be adapted to the contemporary information environment. The world in which archival procedures implement those principles has changed.

Technology has complicated the processes for creating and managing records, and the environment in which archival management takes place has changed as well.

Providing Access to Archival Collections

Providing Access to Archival Collections

Archivists have always cataloged their collections. In the past, repositories had card catalogs and catalog level descriptions in published repository guides.

Some catalogs followed library rules of the time, and some followed idiosyncratic styles. The one-of-a-kind nature of archival materials guided the descriptive tools—such as finding aids, registers, or inventories—created to provide access to them.

Writing a Collection Development Policy

Writing a Collection Development Policy

Archives and special collection development policies should state what the organization currently holds and the collecting areas, especially records of enduring value that represent the organizations' history. A policy will not only formalize the archives program, but it will allow you to focus on what you would like to acquire as well as to disregard materials that fall outside of the collection. Focusing on what you will not collect will also allow you to deaccession materials that should not be in the collection.

Project Management as Change Management in Heritage Institutions

Project Management as Change Management in Heritage Institutions

Adhering to proven project management practices reduces risk, cuts costs, and improves the success rates of projects. Organizations are likely to nurture a project management culture when they understand the value it brings and how projects drive change.