Job Analysis Part 1

After browsing various library and information science sites for job announcements, I found several positions that intrigued me. Although I am not yet qualified for these positions, I intend to use these job announcements as a guide to the skills that I must obtain throughout my graduate education, as well as, throughout the beginning stages of my career. In this post, I will briefly describe one of the more intriguing positions that I found during my search and dissect it in terms of how it would influence my future career path.

Audio Visual Project Archivist

·      This is a full-time position funded to last for two years. The chosen candidate will help to take 2,800 linear feet of archives and make them fully accessible for researchers. The collection includes manuscripts, notebooks, reports, publications, photographs, moving images, and sound recordings but the selected candidate will focus on the audiovisual material.

·      Qualifications include:

o   Master’s degree in LIS or history and/or two years of experience processing complex collections

o   Knowledge of current metadata and descriptive standards: DACS, EAD, Dublin Core

o   Knowledge of preservation standards

o   Familiarity with web publishing platforms

Analysis

            One major aspect of this position is that it is temporary. Rather than a long-term archivist position, this one has a pre-determined end date. With this in mind, the chosen candidate must be goal and schedule oriented because they only have a certain length of time to complete the project. I assume the candidate will report to the head archivist at the institution, although the announcement does not explicitly say. Another aspect of this job would be working with a team to complete this project. The candidate must work with the other project archivist who will be focusing on the manuscripts within the collection and manage a team of professionals and interns. Depending on the facilities and available resources, the work environment could be rather small, especially with a number of professionals working on the same project. If this is the case, it will take a lot of choreographing and scheduling to make the most of the space.

            A position such as this one would be the ideal “in-between job” because it is temporary. At the same time, I would gain experience with every aspect of processing a collection from start to finish so by its end, I could easily qualify for more permanent archivist positions. Also, working with audio-visual material would give me an edge in future positions because this kind of material can be trickier to manage and preserve than documents or manuscripts.

Reference
Audio Visual Project Archivist for Hagley's David Sarnoff Collection. (2014, March 21).
        Retrieved from http://careers.archivists.org/jobs/#/detail/6091053/2,false