Archives Director

Imagine a job that allows you to satisfy your insatiable craving for antiquities and history. This is it. Archives Directors are in charge of collecting, reading, cataloguing, organizing, and preserving a wide array of one-of-a-kind historical documents, maps, film, digital records, and photographs.

You can work for a variety of organizations: museums, universities, institutes, state and local governments, the federal government, and even smaller organizations that focus on a particular person or place. Your daily tasks depend on the size of the organization that you work for.

Larger organizations such as the federal government will require that you play a more supervisory role—none of the grunt work but, instead, the joy of reviewing and processing information throughout your workday. If you’re the Archives Director of a smaller venue, you’re not likely to have the luxury of a mega team working underneath you—only one or two individuals at the most. This means that you will play a more hands-on role when it comes to researching, locating, and preserving documents and other materials, as well as helping individuals search through your archives.

As an Archives Director, you must be very knowledgeable about the particular area your archives cover. This is because you serve as a guide for individuals doing research on a particular topic. It’s your responsibility to not only provide them with a well-maintained archive, but to also help them sift through all that historical information.