What is an archivist? What is archiving? I get these questions all the time. It's what happens when you have a passion for something obscure. Sometimes I respond with fun answers like, "I organize old stuff" or "I work in the basement of a museum." The truth is, the job of an archivist is very complex, and it depends what type of archive you work in, what type of job you might focus on. I have talked to many different archivists at many different archives, who have all given different answers to the question. The first archivist I interviewed (at The Museum of Flight) told me she "managed 2-dimensional artifacts." Generally, archiving refers only to pictorial, text, and media, reserving the term "collections management" for the care of an entire museum collection encompassing both archival materials and objects.
When I interviewed an archivist at the National Archives in DC, she explained that they divided their staff by processing, preservation, and reference. She herself had started in processing, found that to be boring, and then moved into reference, where she felt more at home as a strong extrovert passionate about history.
Through my own work and experiences, as well as these and other informational interviews, I have come up with my own perception of how the field of archiving is divided. Each time I interview a new intern, I explain this to them, in order to help chose a project that they will like the most.
Accessioning is the first step in the archival process. Accession records tell the custodial history (who previously owned the material), and a brief description of what is coming into the repository. Accessioning is the step where the items receive their identification number, called their accession number. In the numerical system we use at NHS, also common in other museum archives, this number consists of three parts. The first part is the year in which it is accessioned. Hopefully this is the same year it came into the repository, but unfortunately this is not always the case due to extreme backlog or previous lack of record.
The next step in the archival process is called "processing." This is where the most work, by far, occurs, and also the point at which the accession number is actually attached to the material. This work varies substantially depending on the type of material being dealt with.
Archival processing, which generally refers to text documents, often just consists of inventorying. NHS receives a very wide variety of types of collections, so it is difficult to give a simple description of what archival processing usually entails. At the end of processing, an archival collection should be neatly housed in archival folders, which are placed in a logical order in one or more archival boxes, all of which are properly labeled. In most cases, the collection will require some sort of written inventory (usually a list of folder titles/numbers). Each collection will require a different amount of re-foldering and/or re-organization. Provenance is the idea that a collection should be kept in its original order. This is only sometimes applicable at NHS; many collections come to us with no existing order, in which cases we must establish a logical order for the collection.
Photographs are the most complicated by far. They cannot be represented by simply a name; all require a fully descriptive title. A picture says a thousand words, right? So how does one manage them? First of all, every image must be given a number so that it can be kept track of. Second, every photo must be put in a proper sleeve to protect it from fingers, as well as from the surrounding air. The photos should be arranged in the most logical order, like archival collections, and housed in folders and/or boxes. An inventory must be made, and ideally, all images will also be scanned.
I think of media as falling somewhere between object and archive. A video has a proper title and creator, but generally requires little more work than housing and inventory. Collections with mixed forms of media can be hard to properly house (cassettes, VHS tapes, DVDs and CDs often come in collections together). Usually, the whole collection will be arranged in the most logical order (usually chronologically or alphabetically), given sequential accession numbers in that order, then separated by format for proper housing.
Collections processing is generally the simplest, because objects usually come in small donations. The object(s) must be described, and then housed with acid-free paper, or whatever packaging is appropriate, labeled, and placed in the collections room. However, some collections can be quite large. For example, an intern is currently working on processing a collection containing 1000's of pins. Each pin needs to be labeled with its individual accession number, housed in an archival box, and then a complete inventory of the entire collection must be made. We also are slowly making it standard procedure to photograph objects in the collection in order to have a visual record of the object.
The line between processing and preservation can be a fine one, but there are distinct enough differences so that it deserves its own category. At NHS, we don't do a substantial amount of preservation work. For example, my campaigning for a freezer is a sort of preservation effort, but the work done to prepare the negatives to go into the freezer would all be considered processing. Generally, I like to think of preservation as anything that requires much scientific knowledge or skill, beyond putting photos in sleeves or objects in paper.
Reference is the applicable side of archiving. Archives are organized for the purpose of helping researchers find the information they are looking for, and archivists are there to help. Reference generally works in two ways: researchers come in and do their research with you assisting and supervising, or they ask you to find something for them. Since we don't have a "reference archivist," NHS runs its archives on an appointment-only basis. When a researcher comes in, I pull the materials they are interested in, which usually end up being folder-level, often from the subject files, but sometimes from other collections. A few times a week, we get research requests either by phone or email. Sometimes a researcher is looking for a specific fact, other times they are looking for generic "information." The latter is much harder, because they often don't want to sift through a collection themselves, so I have to, for example, pick out exactly what pages they might be interested in and scan them.
The archival process is fairly simple in concept, but in reality, it is very multi-faceted and always interesting!
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