Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bits: Archival Motivation In The Digital Age, Heather Ryan, Jane Nelson

Library and Information Science: Student Scholarship

Why do people become archivists? Historically (and anecdotally) it was a deep love of musty, old records that drew people to the profession. While there have been many other motivating forces that inspired would-be archivists, it is most often that one hears of people seeking jobs in archives for love of “the stuff,” as evidenced in Kate Thiemer’s blog post, Honest tips for wannabe archivists (2012).

As a result of the continually advancing presence of digitized and born digital archival collections, the physical nature of archival “stuff” is changing. While there remains the physical imprint of digital information on floppy …