In recent years, the concept of “slow librarianship” has emerged as a thoughtful response to the accelerating pace and pressures placed upon library professionals. Drawing inspiration from the broader slow movement, it emphasizes care, reflection, ethics, and people-centered work over speed and efficiency.
Archivists can imagine a similar framework for their profession. Slow archiving offers a way to resist the relentless pull of neoliberal models, instead prioritizing relationships.
Resist the Push for Speed in Archival Work
Backlogs, throughput, and processing metrics have long framed archival work. Many repositories set benchmarks for the number of boxes processed or the number of digital objects ingested. While these metrics aid reporting, they risk reducing archival labor to a factory model.
Slow archiving resists the notion that faster processing equates to better work. Instead, it reframes archival practice as intentional and reflective, recognizing that archivists cannot rush arrangement, description, preservation, and access.
This shift challenges the narrative of archives as units of production. It acknowledges that numbers fail to capture the essence of archival work, such as building trust with donors and consulting with communities.
Center Relationships and Long-Term Trust
A slow approach places relationships at the center of practice. Archivists are facilitators of dialogue between creators, communities, and future users. Slow archiving validates the time it takes to listen to donors and learn from the communities whose histories collections represent. Rather than prioritizing immediate outputs, slow archiving values long-term trust and reciprocity. For example, an archivist may spend months cultivating a relationship with a community before transferring any records.
Emphasize Care for Collections and Archivists Alike
The ethos of care runs through slow archiving. Caring for records involves both technical preservation and stewardship. Archivists often feel pressure to “do more with less,” which can lead to burnout and the acceptance of unsustainable workloads. Slow archiving reframes care as a reciprocal practice: archivists care for collections, but they also care for themselves and their colleagues.
Doing so may involve setting realistic goals, advocating for sustainable staffing levels, or creating space for professional growth. Care in this sense is an ethical and practical necessity. Without healthy archivists, collections cannot thrive.
Value Reflection and Ethical Practice
Archival decisions are rarely neutral. What archivists appraise, how they describe materials, and how they are made accessible are shaped by institutional priorities and professional judgment.
Slow archiving creates time to reflect on these decisions and prompts critical questions about who benefits from preserving a collection, who its description or use might harm, and how to make access policies more equitable. Taking the time to engage with these questions helps ensure that archival work aligns with the values of inclusivity and accountability.
Balance Technology with Intentionality
At a time of rapid technological change, institutions often pressure archives to keep pace with digital innovations. While technology is an essential part of archival stewardship, slow archiving encourages archivists to adopt tools deliberately rather than reactively. Archivists ask what technology can do, why institutions implement it, and who benefits from it.
Digitization, for example, may improve user access, but if pursued solely for speed or visibility, it risks flattening the archival record and overlooking questions of context. Slow archiving prioritizes intentional digitization strategies that balance preservation needs, user desires, and sustainability.
Reimagine Success Beyond Output and Metrics
Numbers such as linear feet processed, gigabytes preserved, or items digitized often serve as measures of success in archives. Slow archiving proposes different measures of success by shifting the emphasis from outputs to impact.
A donor who feels heard, a researcher who discovers unexpected meaning through a collection, a community that sees itself represented, or an archivist who feels supported in their professional growth reflects archival value. These outcomes may not fit easily into spreadsheets or annual reports, but they are vital indicators of an archives’ impact.
Accept the Invitation to a Slow Archiving Mindset
Slow archiving invites archivists to reflect and reorient their practice toward care. Just as the slow food movement resists industrial shortcuts in favor of nourishment and sustainability, slow archiving resists the pressure to treat cultural heritage as just another unit of production.
In a world that values speed, slow archiving reminds us that meaningful work requires time and attention. By prioritizing people over metrics and care over efficiency, archivists can ensure that archives remain places of cultural memory and heritage.
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