ARCHIVES*RECORDS 2019

This Pop-Up Session will discuss the current state of generally low pay for archivists in the U.S., discuss SAA and regional archival organizations recent attempts at doing something about it, including archival certification, salary job listing requirements, recommended salary minimums, and the current literature in the field; look at salaries across the country and useful statistical data like the salary required to own a home in a specific city; and strategize additional ways the profession can help push salaries upwards, including possibly unionization.

This session will require a lot of audience participation: so bring your "concise" archival salary horror stories (anonymized please) so we can all commiserate, BUT also bring a "workable" strategy or two to suggest to help bring salaries up in the archival profession. The panel will later compile all the ideas and post them publicly.

The low salaries in the archival profession can limit wealth accumulation over a lifetime needed to provide for the retirement years, lead to a lower quality of life, and can even take an emotional toll on its current employees. The low salaries can even be partially blamed for another major problem within the profession, the lack of diversity. Why get a graduate level education for archival pay, when you can get a bachelor’s degree in many other fields and make double what an archivist makes? Better pay for archivists would help change this major problem.


Talya Cooper will describe her recent success in organizing archivists in New York to unionize, and describe how archivists in the United States could theoretically go about this nationally.

Rosemary K. J. Davis will talk about the problematic hiring practices in the archival profession that take an emotional toll on job seekers, the multiple temporary job statuses, and the poor salaries leading to student loan debt problems.

Mark Lambert will review recent steps to raise archival pay, and discuss some possible additional steps for pushing up pay in the archival profession, using statistics from around the profession and about the current U.S. economy.