The article by Kate Theimer talks heavily about the meaning of archives to Archivists compared to Digital Humanists. When an Archivist thinks of the word archives, they do not think of an online grouping of digital copies of non-digital original material often comprised of materials located in different physical repositories or collections, purposefully selected and arranged to support a scholarly goal. However, Digital Humanists do and this is where the difference between Archivist and Digital Humanists comes in. An Archivist perceives the word archives as materials with an organic relationship and so what defines the work of an archivist, and so “archives” in the mind of an archivist, is what materials are selected and how they are managed.

Firstly, the way Archivists and Digital Humanists collect information are different from each other. When Kate said that archivists do not select information this was very confusing to me at first and I wonder that if archivists do not select information, then how do they gather the information to make the archives. But then Kate went on to say that archivists may collect information, they do not select individual items, instead, they collect/ select information at an aggregate level. When she said this, it became clear to me and understood that while Digital Humanists select individual items, archivists do not, where they gather the information as a whole unit. Secondly, Archivist describes archives by the person who made them, not by who or what it is made about. Kate gave an example “if the digital humanist Linda Tompkins creates a digital collection of materials related to John Ruskin, do these materials not constitute “materials created or received by a person, family, or organization, public or private, in the conduct of their affairs and preserved because of the enduring value contained in the information they contain or as evidence of the functions and responsibilities of their creator?” The archival response would be probably yes, but then they would be the archives of Linda Tompkins, not the John Ruskin Archives.” This example can be a bit confusing, but from what I can take from it this means that where the Archivist collects the information (aggregates), then it is not called an archive of John Ruskin but a collection, and this collection is part of the archives of Linda Tompkins.

In short Archivists and Digital Humanists perceive the word archives differently in two ways. The first is how they gather/ collect information, while Digital Humanists collect individual items, Archivist on the other hand collect information at an aggregate level. Next Archivist will name the archives according to the source of the aggregate rather than the subject.