The following case study is adapted from the comprehensive Phase 1 (People) report prepared for the Public Knowledge program of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of a larger eighteen-month research project on archives and climate change.
Climate change is already impacting archives. On the surface such concerns might revolve around building damage, like major events such as major hurricanes or wildfires that dominate the news, or increasingly frequent “minor” events, like burst pipes that are more likely to occur during drought or cold snaps. However, climate change is not just a facilities concern; it affects the people who steward and use archives, and it affects the archival record itself with shifts in professional practice and the documentation of a changing climate.
At the same time climate change is impacting archives, the archivist workforce is undergoing profound changes that are ominous for the continued preservation and accessibility of vulnerable archives within a changed and transforming climate. The state of the archivist workforce will determine the capacity of archives to remain resilient in the face of climate change.
Without a robust and stable workforce, archives are especially vulnerable to the disruptions caused by increasingly severe and unpredictable disasters associated with climate change. To address disasters most effectively, archivists need extensive institutional knowledge, a strong commitment to professional development, and deep ties to the local community. A destabilized workforce has resulted in erosion of all three characteristics among the archivist workforce, making archives more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
Term positions have increased across the profession since the 2008 recession. Numerous studies point to the negative impacts of term positions on individuals and institutions. Term positions are least commonly found in government archives, and more commonly found in academic, for-profit, and other types of archives. BIPOC archivists are slightly more likely to hold term positions than White archivists. Almost half of archivists under 25 have a term position, and over half of recently advertised job postings are term positions.
Term positions (also known as contingent, temporary, contract, and project archivist positions) are typically hired for three years or less, and may or may not receive the same benefits as permanent positions. The Society of American Archivists (SAA) recently approved the Best Practices for Archival Term Positions as an External Standard.1 This Standard discusses the impacts of term positions on individuals, institutions, and diversity, and concludes with guidelines related to designing, recruiting, and managing term positions.2
A handful of studies reviewed for this project solely focus on precarious employment within archives. These include a pair of surveys from the New England Archivists (NEA), published in 2017 and 2022, and a survey from the SAA Issues and Advocacy (SAA I&A) section in 2019. Both studies, which targeted term archivists, revealed significant information about the economic, professional, and personal toll of term positions.
A common finding across these three studies is the degree to which term archivists consider leaving the profession due to the stress associated with term positions. This issue appears to be growing worse over time. The 2017 NEA survey found 26% of respondents were searching for jobs outside the field.3 The 2019 SAA I&A survey found 48.5% respondents had considered leaving the profession either sometimes or regularly.4 Major reasons cited were precarity and financial insecurity. The 2022 NEA survey found nearly 37% of respondents had considered leaving due to issues with term labor, and the number rose to 40% for those in the field less than four years.5 Both the 2019 and 2022 studies found the most frequent sector for term positions was in higher education.
Both the SAA I&A study and the NEA studies underlined that term positions do not provide financial or professional stability for term workers, and the situation is often worse than many realize. The SAA I&A survey found nearly a quarter of respondents took a second job, and more than 20% relied on a partner’s income.6 The 2017 NEA survey found “almost half of all respondents had held a position outside the field since beginning their professional education.”7 The 2022 NEA survey found 54% of respondents experienced delays or barriers to major life commitments such as buying a house or starting a family, 45% experienced financial distress, 22% experienced isolation from support networks and 20% were forced to move when they would not have otherwise done so.8
These destabilizing effects have implications for the ability of archivists to meaningfully engage with climate change mitigation and adaptation. For archivists to make progress on the potentially traumatic changes wrought by climate change, they need to have enough stability to put down community roots, build relationships with emergency planning officials, and understand the local seasonal weather patterns and how this impacts the locations in which they work. Archivists who have worked in one location for a long period of time get to know a facility’s weak points, and can anticipate that leaks may increase during a particular time of year. If there is frequent turnover within an organization due to reliance on term positions, this may mean collections become more vulnerable as the institutional knowledge about facility issues is lost.
The SAA I&A and NEA studies also provide evidence contesting the widely held professional myth that most early career archivists who hold a term position early on use them as a “stepping stone” to a stable permanent position. The I&A Survey found of those who left their term position early, 42% took another term position.9 The 2022 NEA study also analyzed jobs posted between August 2020 and September 2021, and found over half of the more than 200 positions analyzed met the NEA’s definition of contingent employment. Studies of job postings are essential research complements to self-reported data on the archivist profession because this kind of content analysis can substantiate the trends found within self-reported survey data. It is possible that surveys relying on self-reported data may undercount term archivists since term positions often face cost and time barriers to involvement in professional associations.
The largest survey of self-reported archivist workforce data is the Society of American Archivists and Ithaka S+R A*CENSUS II survey. In contrast with the first A*CENSUS, A*CENSUS II asked about permanent vs term positions, including length of term positions. A*CENSUS II reported 88.51% of respondents are currently employed in permanent positions, and 11.48% are in term positions.10 Although term positions have been the focus of immense professional attention and advocacy, the published version of the A*CENSUS II report did not break out demographics of those working in term positions.
Term positions are not equally distributed across the profession. By conducting further analysis of A*CENSUS II data by age group, time in profession, race, and institutional sector, this illustrates where term positions may have a disproportionate impact, particularly among younger archivists, early career archivists, and BIPOC archivists.
According to the A*CENSUS II All Archivists Survey, around 58% of respondents receive professional development funding from their employers.11 However, those in term positions face enormous disadvantages in professional development funding. Term positions are more than twice as likely as permanent positions to lack access to professional development funding.
A*CENSUS II asked respondents about their interest in unionization. Interest in unionization is very high among younger archivists and those in term positions. Union interest is strongly associated with archivists under 45. Almost half of archivists between 25-34 are interested in joining a union. While permanent positions are almost evenly split around union interest or ambivalence, term positions show much more interest in unionization.
Term positions may increasingly become part of collective bargaining demands. The newly formed union of librarians, archivists, and curators at the University of Michigan (LEO-GLAM) recently bargained over term positions in their newest contract, specifying working conditions for term positions and placing a cap on the number of term positions within the bargaining unit. LEO-GLAM’s bargaining unit includes both regular and term appointments.
The University of Michigan LEO-GLAM contract is notable because it is the only example I have found of an instrument that functionally regulates term positions.12 While the newly adopted SAA standard is important, it is a voluntary standard. SAA does not perform any kind of regulatory or accreditation role within American archives. Reliance on voluntary standards means many institutions will likely continue to rely on term positions since there is no countervailing force. Indeed, data from the A*CENSUS II Administrators Survey reinforces the concern that voluntary standards on their own are insufficient. Only 38% of administrators expected to add full-time permanent staff in the next five years, and 61% reported they rarely or never extend permanent job offers to staff in non-permanent positions.13
- Dietz, “Recommendation to Approve Best Practices for Archival Term Positions as an SAA External Standard.” ↩︎
- Clemens et al., “Best Practices for Archival Term Positions.” ↩︎
- Broadnax et al., “New England Archivists Contingent Employment Study,” 17. ↩︎
- Society of American Archivists Issues and Advocacy Section, “Survey on Temporary Labor,” 8. ↩︎
- Bredbenner et al., “‘Nothing About It Was Better Than a Permanent Job’: Report of the New England Archivists Contingent Employment Study Task Force,” 26. ↩︎
- Society of American Archivists Issues and Advocacy Section, “Survey on Temporary Labor,” 12. ↩︎
- Broadnax et al., “New England Archivists Contingent Employment Study,” 6. ↩︎
- Bredbenner et al., “‘Nothing About It Was Better Than a Permanent Job’: Report of the New England Archivists Contingent Employment Study Task Force,” 27. ↩︎
- Society of American Archivists Issues and Advocacy Section, “Survey on Temporary Labor,” 16. ↩︎
- Skinner and Hulbert, “A*CENSUS II, All Archivists Survey Report,” 81. ↩︎
- Skinner and Hulbert, 119. ↩︎
- Regents of the University of Michigan and University of Michigan Lecturers’ Employee Organization, Librarians, Archivists, and Curators Bargaining Unit (LEO-GLAM), “Agreement, July 28, 2022-April 20, 2025.” ↩︎
- Skinner, “A*CENSUS II: Archives Administrators Survey,” 45–48. ↩︎
Sources
Bredbenner, Stephanie, Alison Fulmer, Meghan Rinn, Rosa Oliveira, and Kimberly Barzola. “‘Nothing About It Was Better Than a Permanent Job’: Report of the New England Archivists Contingent Employment Study Task Force,” February 2022. https://newenglandarchivists.org/resources/Documents/Inclusion_Diversity/Contingent-Employment-2022-report.pdf
Broadnax, Micha, Elizabeth Carron, Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Kate Fortier, and Allyson Glazier. “New England Archivists Contingent Employment Study,” January 2017. https://newenglandarchivists.org/resources/Documents/Inclusion_Diversity/NEA%20Contingent%20Employment%20Study%20Final%20Report%202018-08.pdf
Clemens, Alison, Courtney Dean, Angel Diaz, Margaret Hughes, Monika Lehman, Lauren McDaniel, Kit Messick, Sheridan L. Sayles, Sarah Quigley, and Laura Starratt. “Best Practices for Archival Term Positions,” January 14, 2022. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/A4ZC8
Dietz, Kira. “Recommendation to Approve Best Practices for Archival Term Positions as an SAA External Standard,” July 26, 2023. https://www2.archivists.org/sites/all/files/0723-IV-B-1-SC.pdf
Regents of the University of Michigan, and University of Michigan Lecturers’ Employee Organization, Librarians, Archivists, and Curators Bargaining Unit (LEO-GLAM). “Agreement, July 28, 2022-April 20, 2025,” July 28, 2022. https://drive.google.com/file/u/1/d/1EJIcybdQDZm8eJ2kZzaeGxfLUW1csR50/view?usp=share_link&usp=embed_facebook
Skinner, Makala. “A*CENSUS II: Archives Administrators Survey,” January 31, 2023. https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.318227
Skinner, Makala, and Ioana Hulbert. “A*CENSUS II, All Archivists Survey Report.” Ithaka S+R, August 22, 2022. https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.317224
Society of American Archivists Issues and Advocacy Section. “Survey on Temporary Labor,” August 2019. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wF78rJ3LJTf-vmhzyRBWJsIQNuiNb5U7