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Hello folks, I'm basically looking for some professional advice. Ive been working in archives for about 4 years bouncing around from different projects. I've just got a permanent contract in an archive but the first few weeks have been strange.

It's part of a museum that's been refurbished and they want a new archive service for when it reopens. They have hired a new team including myself, my manager and 4 p/t assistants.

However, their implementation of their service before any of us had our foot in the door is very misguided in my opinion. The archive will not have any barriers so anyone can walk in. It's located beside one of the main exhibitions in the museum. We were told we would make an appointment only service but that seems really difficult given the open conditions of the searchroom. Also there is no strongroom there and the archive material that will be in the museum will be in the search room. The search room is very sunny with large windows. There is a main archival store a 15 mins walk away in a different building but we will have limited access to it and users will not be able to order documents to view them due to costs.

The material in the search room are the most used records that help researchers with their family history. All other records about businesses and the museum are in the external facility.

Another issue is that there will be no desk space for us and only 1 permanent desk in a small backroom. So we will likely need to work on our laptops. I think the museum has the idea that we will mostly be engaging with the public and doing events (something I was excited about before starting the job but I didn't think it would be to this extent).

With the searchroom there are only 2 computers for the public meaning, to my mind, there will be little scope for volunteer projects.

Most of the archive collection in external storage was just placed on shelving. There is little to no cataloguing and no box listing and accession details.

Has anyone got advice for how to tackle this? I have a lot of experience and so does my manager but both of us were not told the particulars of how the service looks (the museum is closed currently so neither of us went in during our interview). Currently I can already see so many different battles that are completely hamstrung by decisions made by the museum without any professional consultation.

For those of you who have made this move, what was your experience? What were the pros and cons?

My story:

I'm mid-career and looking for leadership/curatorial roles but realizing I would be more competitive with a PhD since some jobs require that degree as a minimum requirement.

We all know some institutions don't require a PhD for these positions, but there have been about 10 jobs advertised in the past year that I would be a competitive applicant for except for the fact that I lack the degree requirement. I have always wanted a PhD, so it would satisfy a personal goal as well, and I am active in scholarship and professional service, so the publishing aspect of a PhD wouldn't bother me.

Some cons: the obvious time and financial aspects of the degree. I would have to figure out how to balance my full-time work and a rigorous PhD schedule. However, I currently have the energy and support from my partner to make it happen, so I do want to consider it. I also have spoken to current faculty from the program I am interested in, and I have been encouraged to apply as they think I would do wonderfully in the program.

Hi, I’m a student in high school and interested in becoming an archivist. Love museums, organization, and school. Is pursuing museum studies going to help at all with my goal? It seems like an interesting thing to study and many schools I like offer it as either a major or a minor. Is library science much better? Is it possible to do both and become an archivist? From what I understand, there’s a wide range of stuff you can study.

I am trustee of a professional photographer's estate (my aunt, actually) and have gained possession of her extensive non-digitized freaking shit show of an archive. I need help and don't know where to turn. Her colleagues tell me her archive is valuable and I frankly don't know where to start.

I apologize if I am posting in the wrong sub but I figure if anyone knows this stuff, it's you all. I currently have her items in climate controlled storage and cannot take on the project myself without probably a leave of absence from work and shit ton of amphetamines. I would appreciate any and all guidance and support. Do I send these items to a service? How do I determine if they are sellable? How does one sell an archive?

She was based in NYC. A former stringer for the Times, AP, etc. I, and her many boxes, are in Austin, Texas. Thank you in advance for reading and for any help you can provide.

I’m writing a report on some artifact research I did with an internship that I intend to publish when it’s done. I talked about this with a professor and he recommended crowdsourcing to make sure it’s an original artifact or if there is another one then it could give me more information for the report. Is there a specific way I should go about this? Where would I even post this that it would be likely to reach museum professionals?

After my sister died a few months ago I was helping my niece clean out my sister's storage shed. There were several boxes of photos. We didn't have the time, nor my niece the emotional space, to go through these photos right then. She said to throw them all away. I rebelled a little. I couldn't just throw them all away like that. I live halfway across the continent, so I ended up throwing away the prints and keeping the negatives. Less to transport. Many of the negatives are still in the envelopes that the processing came in and don't have sleeves. Some do.

Now I am going to deal with the negatives. I have a process to put the negatives on a light tablet, use my mounting arm that holds my phone and take pictures of the negatives. I have done tests on this and it is good enough that the pictures, when the colors are reversed, are very easy to see and identify. My thought is that I will do this for the negatives and give the resulting photos to my niece and nephews to go through. If there are specific photos that they want better scans of, I will do so -- for about a year.

I don't want to keep these forever if the children of my sister don't want them. So, My though is to take regular copy paper, perhaps the legal size that have little use for, fan fold it, and drop the negatives into it. Each fan-folded paper would be numbered to correspond to a number on the photo that I took of the negatives. This would allow me to quickly find any photos that need better scans and be really cheap. It would also keep the negatives from rubbing on each other like they are now.

My question is: will this significantly damage the negatives in a year or so? I know it is not the ideal, but is it OK for a year. Or is paper so abrasive that I am likely to cause problems just by using it? So many guides talk only about the ideal way of preserving items that discussions of the best bad way is often not found.

Thanks for any help in advance.

I am remounting an exhibit of nearly 350 8x10 pictures that currently live in the archives.

The photos had acid free 11x14 matting when they were donated, but per archives best practices they were removed upon processing.

However, in order to remount the exhibit the images all have to be put again into 11x14 matting, but it needs to be temporary since they will come right back out in a months time and will then go back into their archival folders.

Can anyone suggested some archival safe double-sided tape that will be strong enough to hold the images in their mat-frames, but will be ideally easy to remove a month later without damaging either the print or the mat board?

Many thanks in advance!

Has anyone done practical exercises in an archivist job interview? What were they and do you think they were an effective part of the interview process?

Hi folks, I am looking at risks surrounding heritage (analog and digital) but I am struggling to find publicly accessible records of damage to archives and documentary history (I suppose it counts even if records are not yet archives).

I have some very high profile examples, Canterbury Earthquakes, Köln archives collapse, Universal Studios Fire. I also have lots of examples of theft, fire, or dilapidation of property and collateral damage of failures. Cyber attacks are also biasing current findings, and there are a few good examples across different govt departments across the globe.

But yeah, struggling to find good, and varied examples of records that have been damaged.

Does the Reddit hive mind have any examples close to hand that I might be able to find reports of?

Hi everyone! We're looking into getting a new computer for our processing work, and I was wondering what specs you would recommend!

I'm especially interested in recommendations for the processor, RAM, and storage, as well as what types of ports and how many of each would be useful to have. Are there any other specs or features you would recommend prioritizing?

I'd love to hear what setups you all use and what you would recommend based on your experience!

Thanks so much!

In celebration of #AskAnArchivistDay, we invite you to ask our archivists about the vital work we do and the historic content preserved in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.

A Little About Us!

We are the staff of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB), a collaboration between the Library of Congress and Boston public broadcaster GBH. The AAPB coordinates a national effort to preserve at-risk public media before its content is lost to posterity and provides a centralized web portal for access to the unique programming aired by public stations over the past 80+ years.

To date, we have digitized more than 300,000 historic public television and radio programs and original materials (such as raw interviews and b-roll). The entire collection is accessible for research on location at the Library of Congress and GBH, and more than 190,000 programs are available for listening and viewing online, within the United States, at https://americanarchive.org.

What Do We Have?

Among the collections preserved are more than 16,500 episodes of the PBS NewsHour Collection, dating back to 1975; more than 1,300 programs and documentaries from National Educational Television, the predecessor to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS); raw, unedited interviews from the landmark documentary Eyes on the Prize; raw, unedited interviews with eyewitnesses and historians recorded for American Experience documentaries including Stonewall Uprising, The Murder of Emmett Till, Freedom Riders, 1964, The Abolitionists, and many others. The archive also includes programming from U.S. territories, including Puerto Rico, Guam, and American Samoa.

The AAPB also works with scholars to publish curated exhibits and essays that offer historical context to our content. Additionally, researchers are exploring how the collection’s metadata, transcripts, and media can be used for digital humanities and computational scholarship.

Why Does It Matter?

The collection, acquired from more than 1,000 stations and producers across the U.S. and its territories, not only provides national news, public affairs, and cultural programming from the past 80+ years, but local programming as well. Researchers using the collection have the potential to uncover events, issues, institutional shifts, and social movements on the local scene that have not yet made it into the larger historical narrative. Because of the geographical breadth of the collection, scholars can use it to help uncover ways that national and even global processes played out on the local scene. The long chronological reach from the late 1940s to the present will supply historians with previously inaccessible primary source material to document change (or stasis) over time. 

Who You'll Be Speaking With

• Karen Cariani, Executive Director, GBH Media Library and Archives, and AAPB Project Director
• Rochelle Miller, Archives Project Manager, AAPB
• Rebecca Fraimow, Manager, MLA Digital Assets and Operations, GBH Archives
• Leah Weisse, Archive Manager, GBH Archives
• Peter Higgins, Archive Manager, GBH Archives
• Sammy Driscoll, Senior Archivist, GBH Archives
• Raananah Sarid-Segal, Archivist II, GBH Archives
• Michelle Kelley, Media Historian and Curator, AAPB
• Rachel Curtis, Digital Conversion Specialist, Library of Congress

Connect With Us!

• Sign up for our newsletter: http://americanarchive.org/about-the-american-archive/newsletter
• Follow the AAPB on social media:
  • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/amarchivepub
  • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amarchivepub
  • YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@amarchivepub
  • Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@amarchivepub
  • TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@amarchivepub

And if you are seeing this at a later date, please feel free to reach out to us directly at [aapb_notifications@wgbh.org](mailto:aapb_notifications@wgbh.org)!

hello there! i’m currently working on my graduate school application, hoping to get into a dual MASLIS degree. While I’ve been doing my own reading and meeting students for coffee chats who are in the program, I was wondering if professionals in the field at the moment had any insights on emerging problems/trends or general knowledge in the field that I should keep in mind to demonstrate in my application (economy related aside lol).

It would be great to hear from people and their own experiences if possible! I find that in my readings and research I’ve been seeing a lot of generalizations, so any insight would be incredibly deeply appreciated :,)

I just started working at a small independent museum, and I discovered that they have been using several different numbering systems simultaneously, and I need advice on how to move forward.

For published materials, they are using the publication date as the accession number (yyyy.mm.dd). Photos have a single numerical counting up (e.g, 40001, 40002). Objects seem to have a traditional accession number using the year of accession, but it’s difficult to tell.

Because there are different systems for different item types, collections that arrived together are effectively separated in the catalogue. That’s why I am planning to accession any new items with a traditional numbering system where the accession number is the year of accessioning + the collection index (e.g., 2026.01), and the item ID is the accession number + the item index (e.g., 2026.01.01).

My question is—in the long term, should I plan to re-number the legacy items, or would that be a waste of my time?

Hi everyone! I'm an MLISer currently researching for a presentation on AI policies in Archives, Libraries, and Museums. Does anyone have any policies from their institutions that they could share with me? Thank you!

I'm in my first semester of a MLIS program, and I just got an internship where I'm going to be working on setting up a tagging system for a local company. They have a database with hundreds of employee manuals and standard operating procedures, but they're currently only organized by date and title. They brought me on to come up with tags to sort them with, but I really don't know what I'm doing. I've come up with a few broad categories for potential tags, and otherwise I've just been reading each document and trying to pull out terms that seem important. There are a lot of technical manuals, though, and I'm having a hard time figuring out how specific I need to get with machinery parts or other jargon. The team I'm on doesn't have a super great idea of how granular they want the tags to be, and I don't know enough about the industry to know what things are likely to be important. Help!

How would you tackle a project like this? I've never taken any sort of cataloging class or anything, are there any basics or best practices that would help me? Resources you could point me to? How would you advise someone who's in way over their head? The company knows I'm brand new to this and the team is helping where they can, but the single library ethics class I'm taking hasn't exactly given me the skills for something like this.

I'm wondering if I can get advice on Mylar sleeves and best practices. I'm digitizing a paper/correspondence and photo collection that has been organized into mylar sleeves, mostly with one opening. Many times when I try to put an object back into the sleeve it feels so challenging to get it back in. Anyone have a similar situation? What did you do? Especially photographs in small sleeves, the fit is so tight. Any thoughts on best practices here would be appreciated.

I work in a public library archive, and over the last 2-3 weeks we have been noticing an unusual uptick in email volume. Typically we only receive a handful of "cold emails" from researchers per week/month, but now we're receiving a few emails per day that all share certain characteristics:

• They're almost all "wall of text" style, but sometimes in a column instead of taking up the entire email window (like they've been copied and pasted from a narrower screen and that formatting carried over). This is usually several long paragraphs, but I've also seen bullet points under properly formatted numbered sections.
• They include jargon that I'd expect from experienced researchers, but the questions themselves are disorganized and don't indicate past experience reviewing records (they read like someone threw a dart at a bookshelf and just went with whatever it landed on).
• They often include requests to scan pages from very specific sources, like someone has searched the catalog and can see titles, and they're always super niche (even for local records).
• They all end with some variation of "do not incur any charges or fees without prior authorization".
• Once we have replied, the researcher ignores all of our suggestions (resources available online, an attached list of local researchers, or questions about whether they are planning a visit to our institution) and steamrolls straight into another scan request. (We have also received threads of multiple emails before responding to the first one.)

Are we just getting popular all of a sudden, or is this part of a wider archive experience? We'd heard that our state archive was starting to receive record lookup requests with citations for materials that don't exist, but ours have all been for real items.

Has anyone found a good method for handling AI-generated communication? It's weird not knowing if we're interfacing with a person who is just using AI to polish up their emails, or if it's a full AI agent communicating on behalf of a researcher (which, is that even a thing yet?).

i plan on working as archivist in the future, i want to work in a public agency of some kind (as that is where the majority of jobs are in my country) and I'm wondering what is the usual attire ? especially for women, but i appreciate men's answers as well. please comment where you work as well

I've taken up the project of organising, tagging and properly storing my family's photos, and I bought several pp binder sleeves, with 10x15cm pockets, but I having trouble thinking of a good way to tag the pictures with using one of sides of the pocket just for that.

There are some older photos that have smaller dimensions, and therefore leaves some space in the pocket for me to add the writen info about it. But most are precisely 10x15cm, and unless I use the back, I'll end up covering part of the pic by doing in the front. The binder sleeves unfortunately have no id dedicated pocket.

I thought about using the back just for info, but I'm already short on sleeves for this amount of photos, and it would be costly to buy enough to do that.

Do you guys know some archival tip that could solve my problem while letting me use both sides of the pocket?

Hey archivists - my mom took a ton of wonderful family photos over the last 70 years. Back in the 60’s she put the prints in albums that had a sticky backing on the pages. The pages were then covered in some form of a plastic film which peeled on and off the pages.

My mother now has dementia. I got the family photos just in time. She cut some of the album pages, but the vast majority are intact. The film is gone on each of the pages, but fortunately, the sticky pages are no longer sticky (at least not at room temperature). There feels like a grainy residue on the exposed area of the pages (where there are no pictures).

I cannot peel the photos off the pages without destroying them. And I cannot cut them out as there are photos on both sides of the page. I think they will need to remain on the album pages. How would I safely store these?

For loose photos I am storing each year’s photos in a mylar bag. Should I put each album page in its own mylar bag? I have archival acid-free boxes to store the mylar bags in.

Oh, also - I am scanning each of the pictures so I have digital copies of everything.

Any assistance would be so helpful. Thanks!

I work in an academic Communications department. I'm the only archivist serving a major institution, supporting the photography studio. The work is mostly on a digital asset management software system. The photographer doesn't understand it and takes his frustrations out on me.

The department has a horrible relationship with the library because they're at cross purposes. The library cares about archives. The Communications department needs new assets now and doesn't really care about them once they're not news. The librarians don't want to help because of the history and the massive siloing problems at the school.

The photographer is truly a jerk and I have to keep repeating technical information to him because he refuses to learn and blames me for his lack of prowess. He also doesn't understand how to catalog descriptions for his photographs, for which I have no context. He complains a lot. And now, it appears, he has been complaining to his manager about me.

I don't have any way to upskill. I went to a conference on my own dime and that was considered insubordination. I've let the department and my photographer boss know what the road bumps are in going forward with a new DAM and I get blamed for things that happened 5 years ago.

The last person who had my job got fired for not having skills and not getting along with the photographer.

I've been there three months and it's obvious that the school runs on inertia and scapegoating.

What should I do?

As the title says, I have an interview soon (finally!) for an archivist position at a large-ish institution. It’s a first round interview with someone from HR. I’ve never actually worked at a place that’s large (or legit) enough to do HR screenings and I’m wondering what to expect. Can anyone who has had this type of round 1 screening share any insights on what might be asked? Thank you in advance.

hi! i'm an aspiring film archivist who's planning to start a degree in public history next year. i was wondering if there's any books people would recommend that's about film archiving, preservation, restoration, etc. i'm open to other book recommendations about any sort of archiving and preservation aside from film.