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.