Mastering People Skills in Archives
Interpersonal skills in archives are vital. Understanding and mastering them can lead to better outcomes and stronger team dynamics.
Delivering Archival Results
Balancing projects and operational duties, archivists ensure collections’ comprehensive care while promoting engagement with historical resources
Enhancing Archival Practices with Evaluations
Review and evaluation offer opportunities to assess effectiveness of archival practices, ensuring alignment with evolving standards and best practices.
Archival Preservation and Conservation
Preservation and conservation practices ensure the long-term survival and accessibility of archival materials, preserving their rich legacy
Processing for Archives
Archival processing involves arranging, describing, and cataloging materials to facilitate discovery and retrieval.
Developing Acquisition Strategies for Archives
Acquiring materials is crucial to archival collection development. It is essential to develop effective acquisition strategies.
Establishing Selection Criteria for Archives Collection Development
Establishing clear and well-defined selection criteria is crucial when developing a collection development policy for archives.
Building a Purposeful Archives
Archives collection development policies guide the growth and management of collections in alignment with the mission statement.
Understanding the Archives’ Purpose
This archives expert’s post explores how understanding the purpose of the archives influences the development and management of the collections.
Archival Collection Development Policies
Archival collection development policies are crucial; they provide a roadmap for acquiring, preserving, and managing historical materials
Securing Buy-in for Archival Programs
Expert tips for how to talk about archives to decision-makers; ways to emphasize the value archives bring to our society
Conducting Oral History Interviews: Guidelines for Archivists
The art of conducting oral history interviews requires archivists to develop some essential skills and techniques to ensure a successful outcome.
Why Oral Histories Matter
Oral histories capture the unique stories and experiences of individuals, families, and communities not recorded on paper that would otherwise be lost.
Elements of a Records Survey Worksheet
A records survey worksheet is vital; it helps to systematically identify, organize, and describe records to ensure proper management.
Surveying Organizational Records
A records inventory includes identifying, organizing, and describing records; its steps include surveying, analyzing, and classifying records
Preserving Digitization Results
Digitization projects based on careful review, analysis, and planning are functional and faithful to the archival sources and support new scholarship
Investing in Archival Digital Projects
Archival digital projects offer greater efficiency, opportunity costs, increased institutional prestige, build staff expertise, and improve morale.
Strategizing for Digitization Projects
Archivists strategize before a digitization project. Digitization requires a significant investment, and assessing costs and benefits is essential.
Reading Room Recommendations
An archives reading room should provide reader comfort with optimum security for historical materials.
Processing Room Recommendations
A processing room provides a separate workspace from storage areas where archivists examine, sort, arrange, describe, and rehouse archival materials.
Archival Storage Room Recommendations
Archival storage should incorporate only the materials required to house and store the collections. Detailed recommendations and best practices.
Metadata Creation for Digitized Collections
Metadata provides users with a standardized means of intellectual access to digitized materials.
Descriptive Practices
Digitizing archival materials requires describing them to aid users in discovering them. Description is challenging due to detail required.
Description of Archival Collections
Description of archival collections assumes archivists should increase the number of access points to materials to help users navigate their collections
Quality Control and Post-Production in Digitization Projects
As part of a digitization project, some post-production is necessary to obtain surrogates that match the original’s detail, sharpness, and tonal range
