What Does it Take to Be a Well-rounded Digital Archivist?

The following is a guest post from Peter Chan, a Digital Archivist at the Stanford University Libraries.

Peter Chan

I am a digital archivist at Stanford University. A couple of years ago, Stanford was involved in the AIMS project, which jump-started Stanford’s thinking about the role of a “digital archivist.” The project ended in 2011 and I am the only digital archivist hired as part of the project that is still on the job on a full-time basis. I recently had discussions with my supervisors about the roles and responsibilities of a digital archivist. This inspired me to take a look at job postings for “digital archivists” and what skills and qualifications organizations were currently looking for.

I looked at eight job advertisements for digital archivists that were published in the past 12 months. The responsibilities and qualifications required of digital archivists were very diverse in these organizations. However, all of them required formal training in archival theory and practice. Some institutions placed more emphasis on computer skills and prefer applicants to have programming skills such as PERL, XSLT, Ruby, HTML and experience working with SQL databases and repositories such as DSpace and Fedora. Others required knowledge on a variety of metadata standards. A few even desired knowledge in computer forensic tools such as FTK Imager, AccessData Forensic Toolkits and writeblockers. Most of these tools are at least somewhat familiar to digital archivists/librarians.

Screenshot from the ePADD project.

In my career, however, I have also found other skills useful to the job. In my experience working on two projects (ePADD and GAMECIP), I also found that the knowledge of Natural Language Processing and Linked Open Data/Semantic Web/Ontology was extremely useful. Because of those needs, I became familiar with the Stanford Named Entity Recognizer (NER) and the Apache OpenNLP library to extract personal names, organizational names and locations in email archives in the ePADD project. Additionally, familiarity with SKOS, Open Metadata Registry and Protégé helped publish controlled vocabularies as linked open data and to model the relationship among concepts in video game consoles in the GAMECIP project.

The table below summarizes the tasks I encountered during the past six years working in the field as well as the skills and tools useful to address each task.

This list may seem dishearteningly comprehensive, but I attained these skills with years of experience working as a digital archivist on a number of challenging projects. I didn’t start off knowing everything on this list. I learned these skills and knowledge by going to conferences, workshops, attending the Natural Language Processing MOOC classes and through self-study by seeking resources available online. A digital archivist starting out in this field does not need to have all these skills right off the bat, but does need to be open to and able to consistently learn and apply new knowledge.

Of course, digital archivists in different institutions will have different responsibilities according to their particular situations. I hope this article will generate discussion of the work expected from digital archivists and the knowledge required for them to succeed. Finally, I would like to thank Glynn Edwards, my supervisor, who supports my exploratory investigation into areas which some organizations may consider irrelevant to the job of a digital archivist. As a reminder, my opinions aren’t necessarily that of my employer or any other organizations.