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Archivists

Also called Digital archivist, Records archivist, Archives specialist, Manuscripts archivist, University archivist

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 7,970 US archivists, with median pay of $64,550 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2004, the May 2025 count is the highest. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 80 from 1935, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for archivists: Transkribus AI handwritten text recognition, 2015 to 2022.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 3.4% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

  • 50% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
  • 0.76 estimated probability that the whole occupation could be computerised, over an unspecified number of years. Not a forecast of job losses. Frey and Osborne, 2013

Since the 2013 prediction

In 2013, Frey and Osborne put this job's probability of computerisation at 0.76. BLS counted 5,560 of these jobs in May 2013 and 7,970 in May 2025 (+43%, a change derived by Future History).

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Archivists: jobs and pay since 1935 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-4011

Chicago

Future History. "Archivists: jobs and pay since 1935." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-4011.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_25_4011, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Archivists: jobs and pay since 1935}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-4011}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time
180018251850187519001925195019752000now
Country
2026
Known then as Keeper of Records / Manuscript Librarian (pre-professional era)
Known then as Archival Assistant / Historical Manuscripts Librarian (American Historical Association era)
Known then as Archivist (National Archives and SAA professional era)
Known then as Archivist / Records Archivist (federal-standards expansion era)
Known then as Archivists (BLS SOC 25-4011) / Digital Archivist (born-digital specialization era)
Known today as Archivists (BLS SOC 25-4011) / Digital Archivist (born-digital specialization era)
Projected to still be called Archivists (BLS SOC 25-4011) / Digital Archivist (born-digital specialization era)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
8K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$64,550

≈ $62,895 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1791

The Massachusetts Historical Society is founded in Boston on January 24, 1791 -- the first historical society in the United States and the first institution to systematically collect and preserve historical manuscripts. The Society's manuscript custodians are among the earliest recognizable precursors to the modern archivist in North America. Its founding philosophy -- that primary sources, not just published histories, must be preserved for future understanding -- would define the archival profession for the next two centuries.

Beat · 1934

On June 19, 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs legislation creating the National Archives as an independent federal agency, appointing historian Robert D. W. Connor as the first Archivist of the United States. The legislation had been decades in coming: since the early 19th century, reformers had called for a central archives to rescue federal records from the basements, attics, and abandoned buildings where they were deteriorating. Connor moved into the nearly completed Archives building in 1935 with 80 staff members -- a founding workforce that represented the entire formal federal archivist cadre at the time.

Beat · 1936

The Society of American Archivists is founded at the December 1936 meeting of the American Historical Association in Providence, Rhode Island, with 125 charter members. The three principal founders are Solon Buck (National Archives), Waldo G. Leland (American Council on Learned Societies), and Curtis Garrison (Pennsylvania State Library). SAA's first president is Albert R. Newsome, who immediately faces a boundary dispute with the American Library Association over whose professional territory archives fall within -- a jurisdictional tension that shaped the profession's identity for decades. The first issue of the American Archivist, SAA's flagship journal, appears in 1938.

Beat · 1950

The Federal Records Act of 1950, following recommendations of the Hoover Commission (1947-49), establishes the legal framework for federal records management: each agency must make and preserve records that accurately document its functions, policies, decisions, and transactions. The Act substantially expands the role of the National Archives (renamed the National Archives and Records Service) in overseeing agency records management programs. For working archivists, it means that records management is now a legal obligation, not an institutional preference -- and that the professional archivist workforce must grow to meet the mandate.

Beat · 1984

The National Archives regains independence as a separate federal agency in October 1984, becoming the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Previously, it had been subsumed within the General Services Administration since 1949 -- an administrative arrangement archivists had long criticized as reducing records preservation to a logistics function. Independence restored the Archivist of the United States' direct access to Congress and the President, strengthening the profession's voice in federal records policy. NARA's current permanent workforce numbers approximately 2,800 staff, making it by far the largest single employer of archivists in the United States.

Beat · 1998

EAD Version 1.0 is released in fall 1998 by the Library of Congress and the Society of American Archivists -- the first standard for encoding archival finding aids in a format designed for the World Wide Web. Before EAD, finding aids were paper documents that researchers could only consult in person or receive by mail. The adoption of EAD, though slow in the first years (a 1993-2002 survey found uneven uptake), fundamentally changed the discovery surface of archives: for the first time, a researcher in any location could search for collections by subject, creator, or format without visiting each repository. EAD also revealed, at national scale, the size of archival backlogs -- collections received but never described -- that would drive investment in digital processing staff through the 2000s and 2010s.

Beat · 2021

Transkribus, the AI handwritten text recognition platform developed from EU-funded research projects, reaches 50,000 registered users in February 2021 -- up from 2,200 in 2015. The platform has been adopted by institutions including the British Library, the National Archives of Estonia and Norway, and hundreds of university archives. The growth represents a transformation in how archives address their manuscript transcription backlogs: work that once required years of volunteer labor or unfunded staff time can now be accomplished in weeks of supervised AI-assisted processing. The profession's adoption is not uniform -- institutions with large HTR backlogs and technical staff have moved faster; solo archivists and underfunded local archives have been slower to integrate the tools.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace archivists? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
+3.4%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 25-4011 (Archivists): 10.3 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 10.6 thousand in 2035, a change of +0.3 thousand (+3.4%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (7.1% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Frey & Osborne (2013), "The Future of Employment"
2013 study · Probability of computerisation (2013 model)
76%
probability
What this measures

Published appendix value for SOC 2010 25-4011 Archivists: probability of computerisation 0.76, rank 415 of 702 (rank 1 is least computerisable). Frey and Osborne estimated in 2013, with a Gaussian-process classifier on O*NET variables, how likely the whole occupation is to be technically automatable over "some unspecified number of years, perhaps a decade or two". It is a probability for the occupation, not a share of tasks and not a forecast of jobs lost.

Official statisticReport an error
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
50%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 25-4011.00 Archivists. Shown: human-rated β = 0.5, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.231 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.769; GPT-4-rated β 0.5. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for archivists

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereUse Transkribus AI handwritten text recognition (HTR) to transcribe historical manuscript collections at scale, training custom HTR models on an institution's specific handwriting styles, reviewing and correcting model output, and publishing corrected transcriptions that make collections discoverable for the first time without the years of volunteer labor previously required.

Use Transkribus AI handwritten text recognition (HTR) to transcribe historical manuscript collections at scale, training custom HTR models on an institution's specific handwriting styles, reviewing and correcting model output, and publishing corrected transcriptions that make collections discoverable for the first time without the years of volunteer labor previously required.[6],[7],[5]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Transkribus HTR models trained on an institution's handwriting can achieve high character accuracy on 19th-20th century cursive and higher still on clearer hands, compressing what was once years of volunteer transcription effort into weeks of supervised AI processing. Your role shifts from transcriber to model trainer, quality controller, and exception-handler for difficult hands, damaged documents, and multilingual materials the model cannot handle. Learning to train custom Transkribus models and setting transcription quality thresholds is now a core archivist competency for any institution with significant manuscript holdings.

AI is sitting alongside you hereGenerate transcripts of oral history recordings and archival audio-visual materials using OpenAI Whisper or cloud-based AV transcription services, reviewing speaker-diarized output, correcting proper nouns and technical terminology, and time-stamping corrections for integration into AV access systems.

Generate transcripts of oral history recordings and archival audio-visual materials using OpenAI Whisper or cloud-based AV transcription services, reviewing speaker-diarized output, correcting proper nouns and technical terminology, and time-stamping corrections for integration into AV access systems.[8],[2]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Whisper-large-v3 produces very high accuracy transcripts for clearly recorded audio in major languages, turning AV transcription from a months-long volunteer project into an hours-long review task. The accuracy gaps that require archivist correction cluster predictably: speaker attribution ("he said / she said"), proper nouns (names, organizations, place names), technical jargon, non-English passages, heavy accents, and overlapping speech. Build a post-processing workflow for Whisper output, spellcheck against a controlled vocabulary of names relevant to your collection, and you can process AV backlogs that were previously untouchable.

AI is sitting alongside you hereUse Adobe Acrobat AI and OCR tools to convert scanned documents into searchable PDFs, reviewing recognition accuracy for historical typefaces, correcting degraded-scan errors, and integrating corrected text into the repository's full-text search layer so researchers can discover collection contents that were previously invisible.

Use Adobe Acrobat AI and OCR tools to convert scanned documents into searchable PDFs, reviewing recognition accuracy for historical typefaces, correcting degraded-scan errors, and integrating corrected text into the repository's full-text search layer so researchers can discover collection contents that were previously invisible.[9],[2]

Where your edge is

Adobe Acrobat's AI-assisted OCR handles clean 20th-century typescript at very high accuracy rates and is increasingly effective on older typefaces, but degrades sharply on carbon copies, mimeograph duplicates, water-damaged documents, and non-Latin scripts. Your role is quality-sampling the OCR output at statistically meaningful intervals, building a remediation workflow for problem document types, and ensuring that OCR errors in finding aids and full-text layers don't systematically hide important materials from researchers. Train yourself on ALTO XML and HOCR formats so you can troubleshoot the text layer in your repository system.

Where archivists go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Education Administrators, Postsecondary

Education Administrators, Postsecondary (SOC 11-9033.00) (including university archivist director roles, head of special collections, and dean-of-libraries positions) represent the natural leadership escalation for experienced academic archivists. The pivot moves from processing collections to managing teams, budgets, and institutional strategy, with substantially stronger CRI because administrative authority and community trust are highly resistant to AI displacement. University archivists who step into director or dean roles are increasingly positioned as institutional AI policy advisors, deciding how AI-generated university records are retained, what HTR investments to make, and how to govern researcher access to sensitive digital collections. The barrier is administrative experience and a demonstrated leadership portfolio.

What you'd add
  • · Academic governance: faculty senate engagement, curriculum committee participation, accreditation self-study preparation
  • · Budget management and grant writing (NEH, IMLS, state humanities councils, private foundations)
  • · Personnel management and performance review in a unionized higher education context
  • · Strategic planning for library and archives programs: benchmarking against peer institutions, space planning, digitization roadmap development
  • · Institutional AI policy development: AI records governance, AI use policy for special collections, privacy framework for AI-assisted research tools
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of archivists changed since 1789?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • Physical custody: ledgers, acid-laden paper folders, wooden boxes

    The earliest American record keepers worked entirely by hand and physical organization. Records were stored in whatever came to hand: wooden boxes, leather portfolios, and later bound ledgers. The primary tool of the archivist was the hand-written inventory or calendar -- a list of documents in a collection with brief descriptions, produced by reading each item in turn. The labor was entirely physical and intellectual: no mechanical device assisted in organization, description, or preservation. The main threat to collections was fire, water, rats, and acid-containing paper that slowly destroyed itself. The keeper of records had no professional standards, no formal training, and no community of practice beyond correspondence with fellow historians.

  • Typewriter and card catalog (archival description enters the machine age)

    The typewriter, commercially available from the late 1870s, transformed the archival finding aid from a manuscript curiosity into a reproducible document. Card catalog systems, borrowed from librarianship, gave archives their first systematic subject and name access tools -- a typed card per folder or item, filed alphabetically, physically searchable. Repositories that adopted the typewriter could produce finding aids legible to any researcher; those that did not remained dependent on a single person's handwriting and memory. The technology did not speed the work dramatically but it standardized the output and made archives conceptually shareable across institutions for the first time.

  • Federal Records Acts and microfilm (preservation at scale)

    The founding of the National Archives in 1934 and the Federal Records Act of 1950 created the first formal institutional and legal framework for archivists. More transformatively, microfilm -- commercially mature by the late 1930s and widely adopted through the 1950s -- gave archivists their first tool for creating a preservation surrogate: a document could be filmed and the original could be managed (or destroyed under schedule) without losing access. The Eisenhower-era federal government microfilmed millions of pages of historical records. For the archivist, microfilm changed the job from mere physical custody toward active reformatting and preservation planning, the intellectual core of what the profession would become. The negative: microfilm introduced a new type of professional error -- poor filming procedures and vinegar-syndrome acetate bases created a preservation problem that archivists are still addressing.

    Effect on the work

    The Federal Records Act of 1950 and the supporting infrastructure of the National Archives system significantly grew the ranks of government-employed archivists through the 1950s. The national survey of archival agencies in the late 1950s counted roughly 1,300 repositories, each requiring at least one trained records professional.

  • MARC and mainframe databases (machine-readable bibliographic records)

    The Library of Congress's Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) format, developed in the late 1960s and widely adopted through the 1970s, gave archives their first chance to describe holdings in a computer-readable format. For archivists, the MARC-based RLIN and OCLC bibliographic systems (accessible via terminal by the mid-1970s) meant that finding a manuscript collection no longer required writing to each institution individually -- the records were increasingly discoverable online. The 1970s growth in social history -- oral history, labor archives, feminist archives, civil rights collections -- also drove a significant expansion of the archivist workforce as new repositories formed around newly valued historical communities. SAA membership grew substantially through this decade as college and university archives proliferated.

    Effect on the work

    The 1970s and early 1980s were a genuine growth period for archival employment: the rise of social history, new university archives, and state archival programs drove hiring that substantially expanded the occupation beyond its federal core.

  • EAD / internet-accessible finding aids (the World Wide Web transforms discovery)

    Encoded Archival Description (EAD), developed by the Library of Congress and SAA beginning in 1993 and released as Version 1.0 in 1998, was the first standard for encoding archival finding aids in a format designed for the World Wide Web. Before EAD, finding aids were paper documents that researchers had to request by mail or consult in person. After EAD, finding aids became internet-searchable, and the Archives Online platform and similar consortia made holdings visible to researchers globally for the first time. The archivist's job changed: the audience for their descriptive work exploded from in-person researchers to anyone with a browser, and the quality and completeness of description suddenly mattered in a new way. DACS (Describing Archives: A Content Standard), published in 2004, formalized the content standards that EAD encoding assumed.

    Effect on the work

    EAD did not directly expand archivist headcount, but it substantially raised the standard of what "good" archival description meant. The internet-visibility of holdings also revealed the scale of backlogs -- collections received but never described, physically safe but intellectually inaccessible -- that would eventually drive investment in digital-processing staff.

  • Born-digital processing: BitCurator, Archivematica, digital forensics

    By the mid-2000s, archives were receiving born-digital accessions -- hard drives, email exports, floppy disks, optical media -- alongside paper records, and had almost no tools to process them. BitCurator, a suite of digital forensics tools adapted from law enforcement by the University of North Carolina and Maryland (2011-2014), gave archivists their first professional-grade toolkit for acquiring, characterizing, and processing born-digital materials. Archivematica (2013) automated the preservation workflow end to end. These tools did not replace archivists; they created a new category of archivist, the "digital archivist," and a new body of technical knowledge required for the job. Institutions that could not hire digital archivists began to accumulate born-digital backlogs that, by the 2020s, ran to petabytes at major universities and federal agencies.

    Effect on the work

    Digital archiving skills became the most in-demand specialization in archivist job postings by the early 2010s, driving salary premiums and creating a supply gap the profession's graduate programs struggled to fill. By 2020, "Digital Archivist" was one of the fastest-growing job titles within the profession.

  • Transkribus AI handwritten text recognition (HTR)

    Transkribus, developed from the EU-funded tranScriptorium project (2013-2015) and the READ project (2016-2019), gave archivists their first practical AI tool for the most labor-intensive task in the manual-records world: transcribing historical handwriting. The platform grew between 2015 and 2020, a twenty-fold increase in five years, with major institutions including the British Library, the National Archives of Estonia and Norway, and hundreds of university archives adopting it. The archivist's role shifted from transcriber to model trainer, quality controller, and exception-handler. Collections previously inaccessible due to transcription backlogs became discoverable for the first time.

    Effect on the work

    No archivist job loss has been documented as a result of Transkribus -- rather, the tool enabled archivists to tackle backlogs that would otherwise have required decades of unfunded labor. The profession's consensus is that HTR tools have expanded what one archivist can make discoverable rather than reducing headcount.

  • Generative AI tools: Whisper, LLM-assisted description, ArchivesSpace AI integrations

    The 2022-2025 generative AI wave arrived in the archives profession through several converging channels. ArchivesSpace, used by hundreds of repositories, began integrating LLM-assisted drafting of scope notes and subject heading suggestions by 2024-25. ChatGPT and similar tools are being used by archivists to draft biographical histories, administrative histories, and grant narratives from structured inputs, though professional consensus holds that all LLM output requires rigorous verification before publication. The SAA formed an AI task force in 2023-24 to develop guidance. The net effect so far: augmentation, not displacement. The tasks that define the archivist's unique value -- appraisal authority, provenance judgment, access restriction decisions, physical authentication -- are precisely the tasks AI cannot reliably perform, and the profession's ethical framework makes human accountability for those decisions non-negotiable.

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Archivists employment and pay by year

On record since1789
Latest US employment7,970 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$64,550 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+3.4% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

In other countries

The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.

  • Canada (NOC 51102)

    Employment, 2020
    1,565, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021: number of persons with employment income in NOC 51102 Archivists, Canada, reference year 2020. A recipients basis (anyone with employment income during the year), slightly broader than a point-in-time employed count. Statistics Canada Open Licence.
    Median pay, 2020
    C$68,500, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021 (Table 98-10-0586): median employment income for NOC 51102 Archivists, Canada, reference year 2020, full-year full-time workers (the basis comparable to the US OEWS full-time median). Statistics Canada Open Licence.
View all 24 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
193580n/aEst., National Archives Researched contextReport
19583,000n/aEst., Encyclopedia.com Researched contextReport
20045,190$36,470BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
20055,410$37,420BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
20065,460$40,730BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
20075,420$43,110BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
20085,330$45,020BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
20094,900$46,470BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
20105,030$45,200BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
20115,460$46,750BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
20125,640$47,340BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
20135,560$49,110BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
20145,360$49,120BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
20155,460$50,250BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
20165,760$50,500BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
20176,080$51,760BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
20186,370$52,240BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
20196,560$53,950BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
20206,550$56,760BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
20216,120$60,050BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
20227,230$58,640BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
20237,150$59,910BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
20247,050$61,570BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
20257,970$64,550BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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