It's Always More Complicated

(And still open to suggestions...)

This question/prompt came from kindkit.

This may be partly an artefact of the UK situation, in which there are separate training systems and job opportunities for working in archives or in libraries, though some people end up in places where they have to deal with archives and manuscripts and books as well (also sometimes paintings, photographs, and artefacts of interest that people have kindly donated). But in the UK it's perfectly possible to spend your entire career in record repositories.

The thing is, that working with archives, and working with books, journals, digital databases etc, are rather different things.

A book is a book is a book, and while some books fetch ridiculous prices (I cannot believe what some modern first editions go for) the text is going to be the same in any copy (of the same edition) in any library anywhere (with some exceptions for early printed books, associational copies, and really, really rare items).

Whereas archives and manuscripts are unique, though some mss are more unique than others: though I suppose that minor differences are discernable between the notes kept by C18th medical students of the lectures by the same noted anatomist around the same year.

Manuscripts are sort of like books, in that they are discrete items (and medieval/early modern mss are very like books indeed). But archives aren't, really.

In archives, context is important. Identical documents may be found in different archives, but they will be in different contexts, e.g. in one case, letters from the taxman will all be carefully filed and form one example of the person's meticulous habits, in others, they turn up all over the place with shopping lists or personal memos written on the back.

The received wisdom on cataloguing archives is that the original arrangement should be respected, though this is sometimes a utopian hope rather than a guide to practice, as when the person donating the papers remarked that auntie used to keep them in suitcases and turned them out on the floor when looking for something. Or simply because they've undergone a lot of moving around. Even in a relatively coherent archive there may be inconsistencies and things out of place.

Quite often an archivist has to live with chaos for a bit in the interests of ultimate order. Whereas librarians, my impression is, like to be able to give a book a clear classification in whatever system they use, asap.

Archives are multifaceted and labyrinthine and fuzzy at the edges. There is a belief, at least among archivists, that they require a rather different mindset to being a librarian. The impression one gets of how librarians regard archivists is that they can quantify how many books they catalogue in given time period, why can't archivists do something similar? It takes the time it takes.