Peter Chan (Stanford University) has written a post examining the requirements for eight job advertisements for digital archivists from the past year. He found that
all of them required formal training in archival theory and practice. Some institutions placed more emphasis on computer skills and prefer applicants to have programming skills such as PERL, XSLT, Ruby, HTML and experience working with SQL databases and repositories such as DSpace and Fedora. Others required knowledge on a variety of metadata standards. A few even desired knowledge in computer forensic tools such as FTK Imager, AccessData Forensic Toolkits and writeblockers.
Chan also provides a useful outline of many of the tasks that may fall under the responsibilities of Digital Archivists and lists the knowledge, skills, software, and tools needed to accomplish the them.
dh+lib Review
This post was produced through a cooperation between Leigh Bonds, Erica Hayes, Elizabeth Lorang, Kristen Mapes, Jennifer Millen, Sara Parme, Caitlin Pollock, Brian Rosenblum, Marie Seymour-Green (Editors-at-large for the week), Zach Coble (Editor for the week), Sarah Potvin (Site Editor), and Caro Pinto and Roxanne Shirazi (dh+lib Review Editors).