What's in a name?

Thanks to SLA member Richard Hulser for pointing out a terrific article in the New York Times this week, Digital Archivists, Now in Demand.  It points to the growing demand for professionals (some librarians, some not) to organize information assets and the range of job titles and backgrounds those professionals have.

In a discussion of the various ways people end up in this career field, the author quotes SLA member Victoria McCargar as follows:

“People with I.T. backgrounds tend to be wrong for the job,” she said. “They tend to focus on storage solutions: ‘We’ll just throw another 10 terabytes on that server.’” A result, she said, can be “waxy buildup” — a lot of useless files that make it hard to find the good stuff.

(I love that waxy buildup reference!)

Another SLA member, Keith Gurtzweiler, points out in the article that digital archivists can make from US$ 70,000 to US$ 100,000 a year.

How much of your time is spent on archiving your organization’s information assets?  Do your title and your paycheck reflect that?

Comments

[Anita Pujari]

I am really happy to read this piece being an active participant of the Digital Asset Managemnet arena myself. I cannot agree more with the comment on IT specialists being the wrong choice for digital archiving. The right combination is an Information specialist with IT knowledge - even that need not be formal IT but being able to know how best to use/tweak techology as a enabler. How you organise the digital archives, the architecture, the metadata are far more critical to retrieval than the technology used

[Suresh D Nair]

Its really a sigh of relief in the time of recession. In fact, this is the time, when organisation can divert there resources (time) in building up their archives. This should be a wake up call to the Library Schools to re-do their curricula to suit the changed environment.

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