The Zombie Stack Exchanges That Just Won't Die
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:
So, what should the general qualifications for a digital archivist job be in terms of training, credentials and technical chops?
Trevor Owens
Trying to answer this question means aiming at a moving target, as the field is still emergent. The best recent source I've seen is Digital Curation in the Academic Library Job Market (PDF) by Jeonghyun Kim and others. They reviewed 100+ job announcements "to identify competencies required of individuals working in the digital curation field." Quickly summarizing, they found 85% of jobs called for a MLS and 66% for specific curatorial experience. The most common skills and knowledge called for were:
These findings relate to only a section of the field, but they seem reasonable in a broad, current sense.
As someone who has held "digital archivist" positions in academic archives and special collections, I would say a firm understanding of archival principles and experience with a wide range of archival skills is the sine qua non requirement of any archivist.
The approach necessary to properly handle archival materials in physical and digital form are, at a high-level, not substantially different. Some of the unique skills that make archivists well-suited to contemporary positions that require managing digital as well as physical materials are:
Anything else depends on the specific needs of the institution and can include application development, digital repository administration, masters degree in the humanities, etc...
Bill Lefurgy and Aaron Rubinstein have presented excellent responses to this question. I would add that it would be critical for the digital archivist to also understand the content (its importance, historical context, etc.) held in the archive.
A university degree in computational linguistics, also known as natural language processing (NLP). Computational linguistics isn’t computer science, it is “the programmer’s corner” of applied linguistics. Computational linguists are well-trained in information extraction, know to make use of regular expressions and have a deep insiechniques such as OCR, speech recognition and search engine operation. Owning a university degree also implies the qualification to self-educate which is important, too, since there is a variety of computer systems around, including new ones mushrooming day by day.
One more fact that—to my eyes—favours computational linguists over computer scientists is that computer science focuses a lot on well modeled software (which quickly results in large, ressource consuming software architectures) meanwhile utational linguists had to learn to do their job with little equipment for historical reasons, since computers have had little ressources in past days [at least those the linguistics department got approval for] while corpora processing frequently involves processing very large amounts of data.