What should be the qualifications for digital archivist jobs?

Question

I'm increasingly seeing listings for "Digital Archivists" at a range of cultural heritage organizations and many of them look very different from each other.

As academic programs increasingly try to prepare students for careers as digital archivists it would be helpful to have a sense of what the qualifications they should be developing are. With that said, I've seen listings for digital archivists that:

• want people with master's degrees in computer science
• look much more like digital asset manager jobs and are primarily focused on organizing digital assets and doing things like running content management systems.
• want the candidate to have a PhD.
• focus on archival description and are looking for people with an MA or MILS
• include varying degrees of technical skills (in this case MySQL and Archivematica)

So, what should the general qualifications for a digital archivist job be in terms of training, credentials and technical chops?

Answer 1

This was discussed recently on twitter. An answer that came through strongly was that Digital Archivist roles shouldn't exist. Instead archivist roles should include digital capabilities and functions. 

I suspect there will be a transition period before we can reach that goal (assuming we want to). In the interim some things that might be useful qualifications for digital archivists would be:

• Scripting/programming ability
• Experience using, developing, documenting or troubleshooting open source software
• Experience with obsolete software and hardware
• Comfort with metadata and detailed structured documentation
• Ability to communicate the value of digital preservation/digital archiving
• Experience migrating data
• Experience performing database migration
• Master data management experience
• Business Intelligence experience/reporting
• Experience with virtualization (or emulation)
• Experience with digital forensics
• Experience with programmatic pattern matching
• Interest in old digital content

 

Comments

And of course its essential that the interim digital archivist understands archival theory and practice.