New York Times reports: "Digital Archivists, Now in Demand"

"Ms. McCargar estimates that 20,000 people work in the field today — plus others in related areas — and she expects that to triple over the next decade, assuming that economic conditions stabilize before long..."

SLIS alumnus, Jacob Nadal (MLS'2001) was recently quoted in the New York Times.
The article "Fresh Starts: Digital Archivists, Now in Demand" by Conrad De Aenlle was in the "Jobs" section of the February 7, 2009 edition. Excerpts are included below.

Since graduation, Nadal has returned to SLIS several times to teach SLIS S582: Preservation. He was the Chief Preservationist at the Indiana University Libraries, during which time he traveled to Liberia with the Liberian Archives Project. Later, he worked at the Barbara Goldsmith Preservation Division of the New York Public Library, and was featured in the Library Journal on disaster preparedness for libraries. And, as the article below notes, he is currently a preservation officer at U.C.L.A.

Excerpts from the New York Times, February 7, 2009

Fresh Starts:
Digital Archivists, Now in Demand
by Conrad De Aenlle

"WHEN the world entered the digital age, a great majority of human historical records did not immediately make the trip. Literature, film, scientific journals, newspapers, court records, corporate documents and other material, accumulated over centuries, needed to be adapted for computer databases. Once there, it had to be arranged — along with newer, born-digital material — in a way that would let people find what they needed and keep finding it well into the future.

The people entrusted to find a place for this wealth of information are known as digital asset managers, or sometimes as digital archivists and digital preservation officers. Whatever they are called, demand for them is expanding.

One of them is Jacob Nadal, the preservation officer at the University of California, Los Angeles. He does not use the "digital" modifier because his duties include safeguarding analog materials in U.C.L.A.'s collection, not just preparing them to cross the digital divide.

"I don't think there's any day where I would say I'm the digital guy," he said. But he concedes that he's not really an analog, ink-on-paper guy, either, and that is increasingly the case in his field. These days, he noted, "if you want to work in a library, you have to deal in electronic resources."

Mr. Nadal and 10 or so colleagues at U.C.L.A. devote much of their effort to organizing and protecting material in digital form. Their duties include licensing and buying digital content from vendors, assigning identification markers called meta-tags so that material can be found easily, researching copyright matters and ensuring that files remain intact whenever new iterations of relevant software or hardware come along.

Befitting a nascent discipline like digital asset management, Mr. Nadal, 32, said he went into it almost by accident. Unsure of his career ambitions, he began work on various book-scanning and preservation projects as a student at Indiana University, then took them over when the head of preservation left. After that, he said, it "took a year or two for me to realize my career in preservation had started a year or two past." He reckons that many of his peers have had similar experiences. "Among librarians, I think that happenstance may be a typical career path," he said...

Ms. McCargar estimates that 20,000 people work in the field today — plus others in related areas — and she expects that to triple over the next decade, assuming that economic conditions stabilize before long...

Fresh Starts is a monthly column about emerging jobs and job trends.
A version of this article appeared in print on February 8, 2009, on page BU15 of the New York edition."

Posted February 13, 2009