Glossary of Audience Types

Following are definitions of the audience types identified for the Digital Archives Specialist (DAS) Program.

Administrator: An archivist in a large archives who oversees managing archivists, who is responsible for organizational planning, and who does not manage electronic records personally but must ensure an organization’s capacity to manage those records.

Digital curation: The selection, preservation, maintenance, collection, and archiving of digital assets. Within the scope of digital curation is the processing of establishing and developing long-term repositories of digital assets. Curation includes digital asset collection, search and retrieval, certification of trustworthiness, integrity and reliability of content, semantic and ontological continuity, and data audit tracking.

IT professional: A professional who is in charge of various levels of the information technology management in an organization and who is responsible for providing information technology support to an archives.

Legal professional: A professional who is responsible for providing legal advice and support to an archives.

Librarian: A library professional whose primary responsibility is dealing with publications and their use (including digital publications) and who may also deal with digital archival records.

Manager: An archivist who has oversight of the work of other professional archivists and who may or may not manage electronic records directly.

Museum professional: A professional who has responsibility for the management and use of cultural and scientific artifacts and who may also have similar responsibility for digital archival records.

Practitioner: A hands-on front-line archivist who manages or will manage electronic records directly.

Records manager: A professional who is responsible for the management of the records of an organization across their life cycle and who also may have sole responsibility for the management of an organization’s archives, including those in digital form.