Archivists' Information Work Lines: Affective, Information Management, and Hybrid Onsite-Remote Work Performance

This paper is among the first to investigate information work concepts in the archival context. A qualitative case study, it relies on two rounds of semi-structured interviews with information professionals at medical history collections in Philadelphia. These interviews bracketed the six months before and after COVID-19's onset. We analyze three lines of information work that evolved as these archivists shifted the work context to their home environments: affective effort, information management, and hybrid onsite-remote work performance. Findings suggest that tasks such as processing, digitizing, and curating resources (invisible pre-pandemic) and reference services (visible pre-pandemic) overlap in archivists' hybrid onsite-remote work performance during the pandemic. In recognizing the links between archivists' information work and work performance as a holistic approach to studies of the information-intensive archival context, this research has implications for the centrality of work context, purpose, and value in the archival context. Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science & Technology | Oct. 29 – Nov. 3, 2021 | Salt Lake City, UT. Author(s) retain copyright, but ASIS&T receives an exclusive publication license.