In 2022, to be an archivist, it is mandatory to master digital skills and the attention to details is a must. The catalogue records are well organised with many fields like reference code, date and description. One of my tasks is to work on the subject access points to group the records among different thematic areas and make them more user-friendly, addressing better the searches. In particular, at the moment I am optimizing and grouping all the documents related to Computing Teaching in order to make them easier to find by researchers.
Another important aspect of this job is Communication. As previously mentioned, my team works across all the campuses and in collaboration with all the departments. Claire is in charge of Records Management and Digital platforms. Across the University, teams share their communication through chats and web-conference platforms, shared drives and email management programs. All these solutions are in evolving progress; it is necessary to make decisions about how records are stored and being up to date about technologies.
This department deals with collections and original items but also so-called current and semi-current records (bureaucracy, financial invoices, etc…). These records were and sometimes are, obviously pivotal for university operations and they are stored in offsite storages because of their quantity. The most part of them will be destroyed after 10-12 years with the authorization of the department which generated them. A tiny percentage will become part of the archive, in case they could have some historical or educational value in future. During recent years, and especially because of pandemic, there is an increased number of digital records and there will be new open questions regarding how to handle these changes and several meeting with all departments.