Digital Archivist

A Digital Archivist protects old pen and ink documents from time by making digital copies and putting them into databases.

As a Digital Archivist, you take old, historic, or important documents like photographs, journals, books, legal documents and corporate files, and scan them into a computer to preserve them. Once Digital Archivists have a document digitally preserved they then work on organizing it, making sure someone else can come along behind them and easily find the digital record.

To do this job well you need to have knowledge of different computer systems and be incredibly organized. On a daily basis your time will be spent buying and licensing digital content, creating id tags for scanned images, researching copyright laws, and making sure nothing is lost when a system is updated to a newer version.

This is an emerging field, and is expected to grow as our world becomes increasingly digital. In many ways, Digital Archivists are the new-age Librarians. And because of the universal need for digital preservation (companies need a place to keep their old records and files and putting them on a hard drive makes more sense then filling up space with large filing cabinets or boxes), this job will open a lot of different doors: For example both universities and law firms have a high need for this position, but each have very different types of archives.