Raymond MaxwellLSC 761 Electronic Records and Digital Archives

Digital Archivist Competence Review PaperMarch 18, 2018

Digital Archivist Competence Review(assignment #2)

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1. Recent job postings

Early in the semester, I set up an alert on Indeed for “digital archivist,” which resulted in

daily emails of jobs related to the job title. I created an email folder in Google and directed the

digital archivist emails to the folder upon receipt. Then, late in February, I “harvested” the

collected emails and separated out 10-12 job ads that made explicit mention of digital archivist

as a job title. This table details the jobs collected:

Job Title Institution Type

Digital Archivist American Baptist Historical Society Religious organization

Digital Archivist University of Texas Educational

Digital Archivist City Museum of Albuquerque Civic Museum

Digital Archivist Silverman-McGowan Corporate

Digital Asset Archivist Carnegie Institution Think Tank

Digital Archivist Emory University Educational

Digital Archivist LulaRoe LLC Corporate

Digital Archivist Drexel University Educational

Digital Asset Archivist Aquent (Toy and Entertainment) Corporate

Digital Archivist University of California - San Diego Educational

Table #1

I felt this was a good list as it included a variety of archival institution types with 40%

university archives, 30% corporate archives, and 30% cultural heritage institutions.

Then for each job ad, I extracted the requirements, duties and responsibilities and put

them into a spreadsheet (click here to view). Using the data in that spreadsheet, I extracted a

list of categories, assigned numbers to each category, and sorted the contents based on the

numbers assigned. Starting out with thirteen categories, I consolidated the list down to a more

manageable nine (9) categories of job duties. Chart #1 below includes the following categories,

their frequencies, and their percentage of the whole:

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Chart #1

1) Reporting, sharing, collaborating and communication skill. 24%

2) Born-digital collecting and processing. 16%

3) Photography and photo archiving and processing. 10%

4) Work flow, tools and best practices. 20%

5) Web-based resources and web archiving. 2.5%

6) Legal environment, security, and intellectual property. 5%

7) Customer service and outreach. 6.3%

8) Professional development and staff training. 5%

9) Basic archiving, storage, and preservation. 10%

2. Professional profiles.

For professional profiles, I relied exclusively on LinkedIn. Thanks to one of our

classmates, after plugging “digital archivist” into the LinkedIn Search box, I knew to write down

the names of 15 professionals with the title “digital archivist,” then looked up each one

separately in LinkedIn. Otherwise, Google will time out after viewing three or four profiles

(unless you buy the Premium package). I picked the “best” ten, and cut and pasted their duties

and responsibilities into a google sheet (click here to view).

Of course, the duties and responsibilities were not in any special order in the original

spreadsheet. I chose four broad categories, organizational, technical, legal, and management,

and assigned the job requirement categories from the previous spreadsheet above to each of

four categories. Here are the results of my deliberation and arrangement:

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A) Organizational:

(1) Reporting, sharing, collaborating and communication skill.

(4) Work flow, tools and best practices.

(8) Professional development and staff training.

B) Technical:

(2) Born-digital collecting and processing.

(3) Photography and photo archiving and processing.

(5) Web-based resources and web archiving.

(9) Basic archiving, storage, and preservation.

C) Legal:

(6) Legal environment, security, and intellectual property.

D) Management, customer service and outreach:

(7) Customer service and outreach.

I applied the four broad categories to each profile job duty and responsibility extracted

from LinkedIn, inserted them by alphabet code into the spreadsheet then sorted them by

alphabet. That sort resulted in the Google sheet cited above and here again.

Next, I calculated the percentage of each broad category as a part of the whole of all

responsibilities and duties. Here are the results:

Table #2

Organizational 24%

Technical 41%

Legal 4%

Management, customer service and outreach

31%

3. Conclusions

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From the data gathered and from the groupings assigned, we can present some

speculative analysis based on our sample.

From this sample, archives jobs seem to be distributed almost evenly across university,

corporate, and cultural heritage institutions, with university archives having a slight edge (See

Table #1).

In the first phase, the most frequently appearing job duties and responsibilities are

spread across the following three categories (60%): reporting, sharing, collaborating and

communication skills; workflow, tools and best practices skills, and born digital collecting and

archiving. The next big group includes basic archiving practices and preservation skills, and

photography and photo archiving skills (20%). The final grouping includes professional

development and staff training skills, customer service and outreach skills, legal, security, and

intellectual property knowledge, and web-based archiving and processing (19%).

In terms of coding, I assigned numbers to the aggregated job duties and responsibilities

drawn from Indeed job announcements. I assigned alphabets to the four broad categories of

reported job descriptions from LinkedIn profiles as follows:

A) Organizational

B) Technical

C) Legal

D) Management, customer service and outreach

Correlating the two spreadsheets, as cited earlier and can be viewed here in its entirety,

technical skills emerge as the predominant category of job duties for digital archivists, with

general management skills a distant second and organizational skills a close third. The

grouping is subjective, and a different person might include different items under different

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categories, but I think this may be a fair breakdown. I see from this the significance of including

courses like Metadata and Digital Curation into the sequence of archivist courses. Ultimately,

LIS programs might be expanded to include an option for information engineering, which might

fully exploit the growing technical requirements of the LIS profession.

It is also interesting that from this sample, management skills, where I included

customer service and outreach, came in second place after technical skills. In my sample,

management skills included marketing, university publishing, establishing internal policies and

procedures, grants identification and administration, collection development and acquisition,

development of pilot programs for new initiatives, creating crowdsourcing programs, etc.

Increasingly, the skills of sharing, collaborating and managing joint projects across disciplines

will be essential not only for digital archivist (but especially for digital archivists) but for all LIS

professionals. I also included communications skills under the overall management umbrella.

What is also interesting, however, is that while management skills figured prominently in the

self-described job descriptions in LinkedIn, the same skills did not reach a similar importance

in the actual job announcements in Indeed. To me this suggests a bit of sticker shock, i.e., it is

only when job applicants actually get into the job that they discover the extent to which their

time will be consumed with management duties and responsibilities. I have found this to be

true in my jobs at academic institutions as reference and instruction librarian, as well as in my

short stint at a municipal/state archival institution.

It is not surprising that organizational skills figured prominently in the range of skills. But

the job duties cited refer not so much the ability to organize as to the awareness of one’s place

in an organization, and the entrepreneurial skills required to navigate and maneuver in that

organization to get things done. Failure to grasp the bureaucratic setting of a position is a

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recipe for career disaster. Early in my former career, a mentor told me to read A Bureaucratic

Entrepreneur. It proved to be a worthy recommendation.

I also included under organizational skills the labor intensive responsibilities of training

and supervising student workers, supervision of rotating volunteers, providing guidance to

outside offices and departments, and managing interns. These skills seem almost easy from

the outside but can be time consuming things that draw one away from aforementioned

technical and management responsibilities.

When I chose legal responsibilities as a category, I thought it would be greater as some

reference to it showed up in several job ads. But from the actual LinkedIn job descriptions, it

was not that significant, only reaching 4%. I predict as the profession move more into born

digital assets, we will see a rise in the frequency of this particular knowledge as a job duty or

responsibility.

Finally, I want to review some Google Sheets lessons learned.

Google sheets are an excellent tool for many reasons. They are just as easy to navigate

and manipulate as Excel spreadsheets. Maybe easier, in fact. Most importantly, one can

publish Google sheets to the web, get a link, then link those sheets into one's work document. I

have used that feature in this paper and I hope it serves to amplify and illustrate the work I

have done. One note of caution, however. Once uploading the Google sheet to the web, I

found it was not easy or intuitive to make changes to it. Same with Google tables. So it is best

to get it to a finished state before the upload. With Tables in a Mac environment, one cannot

make changes in the Mac Pages document after it is saved, but once you import to a Word

doc, you can make changes to the table in the document.

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This has been a useful project. It is helpful to students to know what is required in job

announcements and what is expected in the actual workplace. It is also helpful to know where

the grey areas are, what is not advertised, and where the differences lie. I think with more time

and additional thought and refinement, my work on this exercise could be expanded to serve

as a model for examining other LIS career paths and at various career stages.

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