Harland Harris

I am Harland Harris. I am an archivist, an artist, a music lover, a history buff, and a process-oriented tech geek. 

I began this blog to share my experience becoming an archivist through on-the-job training. Please don’t fret, it’ll creep into non-archival territory from time to time.

If you’ve ever wondered:

• “Archive vs. library?”
• “What the hell is an archive?”
• “What kind of training does one need to become an archivist?”
• “Jpg vs. tif vs. pdf?”
• “How on earth did we get this fascinating document, and why was it stuffed under this two-foot-tall stack of website printouts?”
• “Digitization vs. digitalization?”

If any of the above questions have perplexed you, stick around. I’ll get to the answers eventually.

First, a bit more about myself.

Professionally, I currently manage a rural archive in coastal Georgia, and before that, I directed a creative team building websites, interactive applications, and managing large-scale software systems. 

Yes, moving into the archives world was a huge change. And even further removed from my undergraduate education in studio arts printmaking and photography.

I’ll be sharing the issues I’ve encountered on the job and how I solved them, or if I’ve simply tucked them under a two-foot-tall stack of papers for a later archivist to discover.