Things You Should Know About Being an Archivist

Playfully Tacky

In my regular life, I’m an archivist. I deal with getting historical records ready and available for researchers. And . . . a whole lot of other stuff I won’t try to explain here. I work in a manuscripts repository, not a government or corporate archives, so most of what I’m going to tell you about deals with an environment of local family history and business records.
[Right: What I think I look like when doing my job.]

1) You will have to deal with people.
I hear so many people say they want to enter the history professions because they don’t like dealing with people. Big mistake. While it is true that I do spend much of my week sitting in a quiet room, a huge part of my job is serving the public. Whether it is working in the research room, assisting off-site researchers, finding photographs for publishers…

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News: Bulgarian Journalists Search the Files of the Former State Security Services: The Murder of Georgi Markov, The Assassination Attempt on the Pope, and The Communist Regime’s Repression

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Opening the files of the former communist security services has been a long and painful process for most of the East European States. In Bulgaria, The Dossier Act (officially The Law for Access and Disclosure of the Documents of Affiliation of Bulgarian Citizens to the State Security and the Intelligence Services of the Bulgarian National Army) was adopted in December 2006. It established the Dossier Committee which is responsible for opening formerly closed Intelligence files to the public. Before the Dossier Act, researchers faced ineffective access to archives and an unwillingness by institutions to open these files.  Often, the courts were their only remedy.

The right to turn to the courts for access was established six years earlier, in the Access to Public Information Act (APIA). At the Act’s inception, journalists were skeptical toward the law’s effectiveness. Nevertheless, they soon realized APIA greatly helped their journalistic endeavors.  APIA was used…

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