About The Working Archivist

The Working Archivist is a practitioner publication about keeping records usable. It covers the working parts of the job: choosing formats that survive, describing material so it can be found, proving that a digital object is what it claims to be, and getting documents out of the institutions that hold them.

The audience is anyone responsible for trustworthy documents over time. That includes records managers and archivists, but also journalists, paralegals, researchers, community historians, and people at small organizations who inherited the filing and want to do it well. The writing assumes you are busy and skeptical, and it aims to change what you do at the desk rather than to survey a field.

Every piece is meant to be applied. Where a guide points to a standard or a tool, it points to open, well-documented ones you can adopt without a budget. Where a topic has legal weight, the guide says plainly that it is not legal advice and points you to the primary sources.

How we work

Guides are written to be accurate and are grounded in the published standards and primary sources they cite, from bodies such as the Library of Congress, the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, NIST, and the offices that administer public records law. Standards change and links rot, so corrections are welcome. If something here is out of date or wrong, that is worth fixing, and reader corrections are the fastest way we learn about it.

The publication is independent. It does not sell placement, and it does not run guides in exchange for links or payment. What appears here appears because it is useful to someone doing the work.