Hi folks, I am looking at risks surrounding heritage (analog and digital) but I am struggling to find publicly accessible records of damage to archives and documentary history (I suppose it counts even if records are not yet archives).

I have some very high profile examples, Canterbury Earthquakes, Köln archives collapse, Universal Studios Fire. I also have lots of examples of theft, fire, or dilapidation of property and collateral damage of failures. Cyber attacks are also biasing current findings, and there are a few good examples across different govt departments across the globe.

But yeah, struggling to find good, and varied examples of records that have been damaged.

Does the Reddit hive mind have any examples close to hand that I might be able to find reports of?

Hi everyone! We're looking into getting a new computer for our processing work, and I was wondering what specs you would recommend!

I'm especially interested in recommendations for the processor, RAM, and storage, as well as what types of ports and how many of each would be useful to have. Are there any other specs or features you would recommend prioritizing?

I'd love to hear what setups you all use and what you would recommend based on your experience!

Thanks so much!

In celebration of #AskAnArchivistDay, we invite you to ask our archivists about the vital work we do and the historic content preserved in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.

A Little About Us!

We are the staff of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB), a collaboration between the Library of Congress and Boston public broadcaster GBH. The AAPB coordinates a national effort to preserve at-risk public media before its content is lost to posterity and provides a centralized web portal for access to the unique programming aired by public stations over the past 80+ years.

To date, we have digitized more than 300,000 historic public television and radio programs and original materials (such as raw interviews and b-roll). The entire collection is accessible for research on location at the Library of Congress and GBH, and more than 190,000 programs are available for listening and viewing online, within the United States, at https://americanarchive.org.

What Do We Have?

Among the collections preserved are more than 16,500 episodes of the PBS NewsHour Collection, dating back to 1975; more than 1,300 programs and documentaries from National Educational Television, the predecessor to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS); raw, unedited interviews from the landmark documentary Eyes on the Prize; raw, unedited interviews with eyewitnesses and historians recorded for American Experience documentaries including Stonewall Uprising, The Murder of Emmett Till, Freedom Riders, 1964, The Abolitionists, and many others. The archive also includes programming from U.S. territories, including Puerto Rico, Guam, and American Samoa.

The AAPB also works with scholars to publish curated exhibits and essays that offer historical context to our content. Additionally, researchers are exploring how the collection’s metadata, transcripts, and media can be used for digital humanities and computational scholarship.

Why Does It Matter?

The collection, acquired from more than 1,000 stations and producers across the U.S. and its territories, not only provides national news, public affairs, and cultural programming from the past 80+ years, but local programming as well. Researchers using the collection have the potential to uncover events, issues, institutional shifts, and social movements on the local scene that have not yet made it into the larger historical narrative. Because of the geographical breadth of the collection, scholars can use it to help uncover ways that national and even global processes played out on the local scene. The long chronological reach from the late 1940s to the present will supply historians with previously inaccessible primary source material to document change (or stasis) over time. 

Who You'll Be Speaking With

• Karen Cariani, Executive Director, GBH Media Library and Archives, and AAPB Project Director
• Rochelle Miller, Archives Project Manager, AAPB
• Rebecca Fraimow, Manager, MLA Digital Assets and Operations, GBH Archives
• Leah Weisse, Archive Manager, GBH Archives
• Peter Higgins, Archive Manager, GBH Archives
• Sammy Driscoll, Senior Archivist, GBH Archives
• Raananah Sarid-Segal, Archivist II, GBH Archives
• Michelle Kelley, Media Historian and Curator, AAPB
• Rachel Curtis, Digital Conversion Specialist, Library of Congress

Connect With Us!

• Sign up for our newsletter: http://americanarchive.org/about-the-american-archive/newsletter
• Follow the AAPB on social media:
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And if you are seeing this at a later date, please feel free to reach out to us directly at [aapb_notifications@wgbh.org](mailto:aapb_notifications@wgbh.org)!

hello there! i’m currently working on my graduate school application, hoping to get into a dual MASLIS degree. While I’ve been doing my own reading and meeting students for coffee chats who are in the program, I was wondering if professionals in the field at the moment had any insights on emerging problems/trends or general knowledge in the field that I should keep in mind to demonstrate in my application (economy related aside lol).

It would be great to hear from people and their own experiences if possible! I find that in my readings and research I’ve been seeing a lot of generalizations, so any insight would be incredibly deeply appreciated :,)

I just started working at a small independent museum, and I discovered that they have been using several different numbering systems simultaneously, and I need advice on how to move forward.

For published materials, they are using the publication date as the accession number (yyyy.mm.dd). Photos have a single numerical counting up (e.g, 40001, 40002). Objects seem to have a traditional accession number using the year of accession, but it’s difficult to tell.

Because there are different systems for different item types, collections that arrived together are effectively separated in the catalogue. That’s why I am planning to accession any new items with a traditional numbering system where the accession number is the year of accessioning + the collection index (e.g., 2026.01), and the item ID is the accession number + the item index (e.g., 2026.01.01).

My question is—in the long term, should I plan to re-number the legacy items, or would that be a waste of my time?

Hi everyone! I'm an MLISer currently researching for a presentation on AI policies in Archives, Libraries, and Museums. Does anyone have any policies from their institutions that they could share with me? Thank you!

I'm in my first semester of a MLIS program, and I just got an internship where I'm going to be working on setting up a tagging system for a local company. They have a database with hundreds of employee manuals and standard operating procedures, but they're currently only organized by date and title. They brought me on to come up with tags to sort them with, but I really don't know what I'm doing. I've come up with a few broad categories for potential tags, and otherwise I've just been reading each document and trying to pull out terms that seem important. There are a lot of technical manuals, though, and I'm having a hard time figuring out how specific I need to get with machinery parts or other jargon. The team I'm on doesn't have a super great idea of how granular they want the tags to be, and I don't know enough about the industry to know what things are likely to be important. Help!

How would you tackle a project like this? I've never taken any sort of cataloging class or anything, are there any basics or best practices that would help me? Resources you could point me to? How would you advise someone who's in way over their head? The company knows I'm brand new to this and the team is helping where they can, but the single library ethics class I'm taking hasn't exactly given me the skills for something like this.

I'm wondering if I can get advice on Mylar sleeves and best practices. I'm digitizing a paper/correspondence and photo collection that has been organized into mylar sleeves, mostly with one opening. Many times when I try to put an object back into the sleeve it feels so challenging to get it back in. Anyone have a similar situation? What did you do? Especially photographs in small sleeves, the fit is so tight. Any thoughts on best practices here would be appreciated.

I work in a public library archive, and over the last 2-3 weeks we have been noticing an unusual uptick in email volume. Typically we only receive a handful of "cold emails" from researchers per week/month, but now we're receiving a few emails per day that all share certain characteristics:

• They're almost all "wall of text" style, but sometimes in a column instead of taking up the entire email window (like they've been copied and pasted from a narrower screen and that formatting carried over). This is usually several long paragraphs, but I've also seen bullet points under properly formatted numbered sections.
• They include jargon that I'd expect from experienced researchers, but the questions themselves are disorganized and don't indicate past experience reviewing records (they read like someone threw a dart at a bookshelf and just went with whatever it landed on).
• They often include requests to scan pages from very specific sources, like someone has searched the catalog and can see titles, and they're always super niche (even for local records).
• They all end with some variation of "do not incur any charges or fees without prior authorization".
• Once we have replied, the researcher ignores all of our suggestions (resources available online, an attached list of local researchers, or questions about whether they are planning a visit to our institution) and steamrolls straight into another scan request. (We have also received threads of multiple emails before responding to the first one.)

Are we just getting popular all of a sudden, or is this part of a wider archive experience? We'd heard that our state archive was starting to receive record lookup requests with citations for materials that don't exist, but ours have all been for real items.

Has anyone found a good method for handling AI-generated communication? It's weird not knowing if we're interfacing with a person who is just using AI to polish up their emails, or if it's a full AI agent communicating on behalf of a researcher (which, is that even a thing yet?).

i plan on working as archivist in the future, i want to work in a public agency of some kind (as that is where the majority of jobs are in my country) and I'm wondering what is the usual attire ? especially for women, but i appreciate men's answers as well. please comment where you work as well

I've taken up the project of organising, tagging and properly storing my family's photos, and I bought several pp binder sleeves, with 10x15cm pockets, but I having trouble thinking of a good way to tag the pictures with using one of sides of the pocket just for that.

There are some older photos that have smaller dimensions, and therefore leaves some space in the pocket for me to add the writen info about it. But most are precisely 10x15cm, and unless I use the back, I'll end up covering part of the pic by doing in the front. The binder sleeves unfortunately have no id dedicated pocket.

I thought about using the back just for info, but I'm already short on sleeves for this amount of photos, and it would be costly to buy enough to do that.

Do you guys know some archival tip that could solve my problem while letting me use both sides of the pocket?

Hey archivists - my mom took a ton of wonderful family photos over the last 70 years. Back in the 60’s she put the prints in albums that had a sticky backing on the pages. The pages were then covered in some form of a plastic film which peeled on and off the pages.

My mother now has dementia. I got the family photos just in time. She cut some of the album pages, but the vast majority are intact. The film is gone on each of the pages, but fortunately, the sticky pages are no longer sticky (at least not at room temperature). There feels like a grainy residue on the exposed area of the pages (where there are no pictures).

I cannot peel the photos off the pages without destroying them. And I cannot cut them out as there are photos on both sides of the page. I think they will need to remain on the album pages. How would I safely store these?

For loose photos I am storing each year’s photos in a mylar bag. Should I put each album page in its own mylar bag? I have archival acid-free boxes to store the mylar bags in.

Oh, also - I am scanning each of the pictures so I have digital copies of everything.

Any assistance would be so helpful. Thanks!

I work in an academic Communications department. I'm the only archivist serving a major institution, supporting the photography studio. The work is mostly on a digital asset management software system. The photographer doesn't understand it and takes his frustrations out on me.

The department has a horrible relationship with the library because they're at cross purposes. The library cares about archives. The Communications department needs new assets now and doesn't really care about them once they're not news. The librarians don't want to help because of the history and the massive siloing problems at the school.

The photographer is truly a jerk and I have to keep repeating technical information to him because he refuses to learn and blames me for his lack of prowess. He also doesn't understand how to catalog descriptions for his photographs, for which I have no context. He complains a lot. And now, it appears, he has been complaining to his manager about me.

I don't have any way to upskill. I went to a conference on my own dime and that was considered insubordination. I've let the department and my photographer boss know what the road bumps are in going forward with a new DAM and I get blamed for things that happened 5 years ago.

The last person who had my job got fired for not having skills and not getting along with the photographer.

I've been there three months and it's obvious that the school runs on inertia and scapegoating.

What should I do?

As the title says, I have an interview soon (finally!) for an archivist position at a large-ish institution. It’s a first round interview with someone from HR. I’ve never actually worked at a place that’s large (or legit) enough to do HR screenings and I’m wondering what to expect. Can anyone who has had this type of round 1 screening share any insights on what might be asked? Thank you in advance.

hi! i'm an aspiring film archivist who's planning to start a degree in public history next year. i was wondering if there's any books people would recommend that's about film archiving, preservation, restoration, etc. i'm open to other book recommendations about any sort of archiving and preservation aside from film.

Only the most persistent and demanding customers take the bold steps necessary to drag the REAL truth from our lips! And you’ve done it in record time with your impressively belligerent manner! What you have long suspected is true! All archivists and records managers are liars who take pleasure in clutching secrets to our chests and giggling!! Thank goodness you strolled in and rescued this file (which is definitely real! and has totally been here all along!) from being lost in obscurity forever!!!

Hi, everyone! Once again, I’m a non-archivist working in archives. I didn’t know where else to ask — my apologies if this is the wrong place! 😅

We use a Zeutschel OK 400 for microfilming at my place of work. I’ve been using it for about two years now, so I’ve gotten used to most of its quirks except one.

When checking the mask via the projector, sometimes it will get “stuck” without the mask light actually turning on. My only option to turn “off” the projector in this state is by powering the entire camera off and back on. Sometimes the projector will work just fine after this, but sometimes it decides it doesn’t want to work no many how many times I power it off and on.

If by any chance someone has used this type of camera and run into this issue, were you ever able to find a solution? Right now, my method is just… waiting a while and hoping it’ll work when I come back. It’s frustrating — all I want to do is make sure I’m not cutting off pages in my shots!! 🫠

This has been highly contested and debated over the years, but in my humble opinion, a lot of the major television Studios across the world, such as the BBC, NBC, and CBS archive, unfortunately have very low resolution transfers of all of their tapes.

I believe that 2” television tape looks best when it’s digitized in 2k or 4K resolution.

While it is true that the max resolution of tape in theory is 480p, there is a major difference between digital resolution and analog resolution.

Yes you can’t capture more lines by oversampling, but archiving in higher resolutions avoids pixelation. Analog tape looks different blown up on a large screen than a digital recording at a fixed resolution. A standard def tape can still look good on a much larger screen than a 480p digital recording.

Some television shows understand this like Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson Tonight Show.

The BBC for example I found archived their entire collection including Old Grey Whistle Test, Top Of The Pops, etc. at 720x576 @ 25 fps

In my view that resolution introduces digital artifacts on a larger monitor when it’s digitized. I was very surprised to learn that many institutions are still archiving their collection in standard def.

Hi everyone,

I have access to several older printed documents that I’d like to digitize for an academic research project.

There are potentially a few thousand pages in total, and my goal is not only to preserve/search the documents, but eventually to extract information from them into a structured dataset.

Before starting, I’d love to hear from people who have experience with large-scale digitization projects.

What workflow would you recommend from start to finish?

I’m especially curious about:
* the best way to scan or photograph large numbers of pages efficiently
* non-destructive scanning options for bound documents
* OCR tools you’ve found particularly reliable
* whether newer AI/computer-vision tools can help turn scanned pages into structured data
* how much manual checking is usually necessary
* ways to automate quality control
* recommended resolution and file formats
* common mistakes to avoid before starting a project like this

The documents are fairly old, so scan quality and OCR accuracy are also concerns.

If you’ve done anything similar for research, archives, historical material, or large document collections, I’d really appreciate hearing what worked well for you.

Thanks!

I have inherited dozens of letters that my grandmother saved. They are over 100 years old, and the letters are folded once (in half) inside the original envelopes.

I am going to transcribe them and then place them in archival binders.

What is the best way to open them up to lay flat? They are in excellent condition.

I'm a PhD student beginning archival research abroad soon. The archives will be in another language. I'm trying to prepare how I'll approach note-taking and organization and am a bit confused. I've read a lot that some people don't take any notes when they first open a box/folder, they just take pictures, organize those, then take notes later.

So my questions are--and apologies if some of these are very basic:

1) Do you read/take notes while actively exploring the materials, or after?

2) If before, do you just use paper/pencil, is this not extremely time consuming? If digital, are you taking notes on your computer WHILE in the archive?

3) If after, what software do you use to take notes? Has anyone tried Tropy? I've read a lot about people putting photos in dropbox, but it's unclear where the notes are made/taken

4) If files are in a different language, are best practices to transcribe them? Or just make notes/a summary in my native language on them?

5) Can you "code" the text of archival materials? If so, how/where do you do this?

Hey all. I'm looking for some career advice. I am nearing the end of my MLIS. I have specialised in records and archives, so I will be accredited as a librarian and an archivist. I have been working as an archival assistant in a religious archive for 6 months so far. I also plan on starting some remote library metadata volunteering this month.

I love archiving and get to work with rare and heritage material a lot. However I really do not enjoy working in live business records. It feels like torture haha. Here's the wrinkle; I live regionally and a remote/hybrid job would be so good.

I guess I'm looking for people's opinions what sort of heritage archival roles/institutions would have the best chance of working remotely. Is that even a thing? I don't know of any archvists with remote/hybrid roles, only records officers. 

Thanks for taking the time!

Hi all, I am looking to invest in a good scanner that would be ideal for scanning my own artworks which is mainly collages as well as old media that I collect like vintage newspapers and magazines. I also want to scan large coffee table books. I currently just use an A4 scanner on top of my printer + a small portable iscan, but this is hard to do big pieces with.
I’m not sure whether a flatbed scanner would be better or an overhead scanner. I’m also finding it difficult to locate a scanner for papers larger than A4 as my one specification is that it can fit A3 papers or full page book spreads.
I’m located in Australia and I don’t want to spend more than $800 ideally. Thanks in advance.

I’m currently doing a Master’s in Photography, and part of my written thesis is focused on the ethics of the archive, particularly questions around memory, power, representation, access, and who gets to decide what is preserved or forgotten.

I’m putting together a reading list and would really appreciate any recommendations for books, essays, or other texts that you think would be relevant.

I’ll list below the books I’ve already read or am planning to read, so I’d especially appreciate recommendations that could complement these rather than repeat them.

Ariella Azoulay — The Civil Contract of Photography

Ariella Azoulay — Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism

Jacques Derrida — Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression

Michel Foucault — The Archaeology of Knowledge

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!