Archivist

Archivists manage and preserve documentary records of permanent historical value — paper and parchment documents, photographs, films, audio recordings, digital records, and born-digital materials — held in repositories ranging from local record offices to national archives, university libraries, hospital archives, corporate archives, and faith community archives. Core professional responsibilities include appraisal (deciding which records have permanent value and should be retained), arrangement and description (cataloguing collections to international standards such as ISAD(G) and EAD, making them discoverable through online finding aids), preservation (managing environmental conditions, conservation treatments, digitisation programmes, and digital preservation strategies), and access (assisting researchers, responding to enquiries, and managing reading room services).

Archivists work with a huge variety of records: medieval charters, Victorian parish registers, twentieth-century local authority minutes, oral history recordings, architects' drawings, photographic collections, and the born-digital records that now form the bulk of modern public sector output. The management of digital records and digital preservation — ensuring that electronic records created today remain accessible in fifty years — is a growing and technically demanding specialist area. Archivists in local record offices manage the public's access to genealogical, legal, and historical records, advising researchers on finding aids and record interpretation.

Professional accreditation is through the Archives and Records Association (ARA), which operates a Registration scheme — Registered Archivist (RA) — based on qualifying education and assessed professional competence. The standard entry qualification is an ARA-accredited postgraduate MA in Archive Studies, Archive Administration, or Records Management (offered at institutions including UCL, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Aberystwyth). The ARA also recognises routes via work-based learning and apprenticeship.

Archives are a legal and constitutional necessity: the Public Records Act 1958, the Local Government (Records) Act 1962, and numerous sectoral regulations (NHS, legal, financial) require organisations to retain and provide access to records for defined periods. Every public sector body in the UK generates records that must be managed professionally; the explosion of digital information is increasing rather than reducing the need for qualified records management and archival expertise. Freedom of Information requests, legal discovery, and genealogical demand create consistent public access requirements that archivists must support.

The archival profession is small, specialist, and consistently in demand: the ARA reports ongoing recruitment needs in local authority record offices, NHS trusts, universities, and national bodies including The National Archives. Digital preservation is a fast-growing and technically complex specialism where qualified professionals are in very short supply. Archival expertise — assessment of provenance, authenticity, and evidential value — cannot be replaced by automated cataloguing tools, which require human editorial judgement to produce meaningful finding aids.

The morning involves answering three genealogical enquiries from members of the public — searching for Victorian census substitutes in the parish register collection, locating a nineteenth-century probate record, and responding to a Freedom of Information request about local planning records. After lunch, you work on the arrangement and description of a newly transferred collection of business records from a local manufacturing firm — sorting boxes, creating a collection-level description in ISAD(G) format, and drafting a series-level inventory for the online catalogue. Late afternoon you attend a meeting with the council's IT department to discuss the transfer of legacy electronic planning records to the digital preservation system.