So You Want to Be an Archivist

People come to the archival profession for many reasons—to tell the story of a community, preserve a piece of history, hold people and institutions accountable, improve access through technology, connect researchers with the documents they need, and more. Archivists work wherever it is important to retain the records of people or organizations, including universities, large corporations, libraries and museums, government institutions, hospitals, historical societies, and religious communities. They work with digital documents, rare manuscripts, analog film, letters, postcards, diaries, photographs, organizational records—and that’s just the start of it.