POST: What Does it Take to Be a Well-Rounded Digital Archivist?

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.