Whats the worst part of being an archivist?
I am not an archivist, but when I was in university I worked part time as an archival assistant in the special collections department. I loved it and I learned a lot from it. I think it depends on what type of material you’re working with. For me, I worked in theatre archives, and various theatres would send boxes of things like house programs, photographs, newspaper clippings, set models, etc. and it was my job to take all the staples out (a lot of that job was actually staple removal), gluing down the articles on special paper with the special glue, and creating fonds (filing systems). It was really interesting work, I learned TONS about the history of theatre in my area, and the time usually went by really fast because I could just listen to my walkman and cut, paste, remove staples and sort stuff. The archivists themselves don’t do this sort of thing, and a friend I used to work with back then went on to become an archivist and she seems to like it. If possible, I’d recommend getti
I work as a manuscripts curator in a large UK library — I’m not a qualified archivist, but my job requires me to do a lot of the things that an archivist does. Like any job, it has its good points and its bad points, but I’ll concentrate on the bad points, since that seems to be what you want to know. A lot of my work is very repetitive and not very intellectually demanding: it consists of removing staples, inserting paperclips, sorting and labelling files and putting them into acid-free folders. I don’t find this a problem as long as the material is intrinsically interesting (and it often is), but I do find it dispiriting when the material is of minor historical significance and there seems little justification for keeping it. My duty as an archivist is ‘not to reason why’, but to catalogue the material and make it available in the hope that someone, someday, will want to read it. The compensation, of course, is when you unpack a box of documents, or untie the string around a bundle
