A growing number of independent editorial projects are being directly informed by the principles of archival research. These editors recognize that meaning is not simply *found* in sources, but actively constructed through the careful examination of incomplete and often disordered materials. By embracing the inherent messiness of the archive its gaps, biases, and layers of interpretation they are forging new approaches to storytelling and knowledge-making. This shift represents a powerful trend toward more nuanced and historically grounded editorial practices.
The connection is not obvious at first. Archives are institutions: universities, museums, government repositories, historical societies. Independent editors are often solo practitioners, working from home offices or shared coworking spaces, serving clients who need help shaping manuscripts, newsletters, or internal communications. What could a centuries-old professional tradition possibly teach someone about building an independent editorial practice?
More than you might expect especially if you follow the conversation that archivists have been having among themselves about the limits of their own profession.
What Professionalism Costs
In a 2024 essay published in RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage, Lia Warner a Reference and Instruction Associate at New York University's Bobst Library argued that the concept of professionalism in archival work has become a kind of cage. The word sounds like praise. In practice, Warner suggested, it has functioned as a mechanism for limiting what archivists understand their own roles to be.
"This article addresses how historical and moral notions of professionalism in the archival context artificially constrict workers' understanding of their roles with regard to interpretive power and intellectual production, and thus hinder communication of the value and potentiality of the archival endeavor to outsiders."
Warner's essay titled "Archiving Against Professionalism" drew on historical analysis of foundational archival texts, engagement with critical theory, and the growing literature of what scholars call the "archival turn." Her argument was not that archivists should abandon rigor or expertise. It was that the professional framework they had inherited defined their work so narrowly as custodianship, service, institutional representation that it prevented them from seeing and communicating the full intellectual weight of what they do.
For Warner, the path forward involved building "collective power" and developing what she called a "liberatory archival practice." The language is deliberately political. She was writing about archivists. But the underlying question what happens when a professional framework blinds you to your own intellectual contribution? is one that independent editors know intimately.
The Historian-Archivist and What Was Lost
The tension Warner described has deep roots. In a February 2025 essay for the Committee on Ethics & Professional Conduct Case Studies & Blog, writer Emma Barton-Norris traced one thread of this history through the evolving Society of American Archivists Code of Ethics.
The 1980 version of the code explicitly acknowledged that archivists could be researchers in their own collections. It included a signal about conflicts of interest, yes but also an acceptance that the archivist and the historian could be the same person. As Carolyn Wallace noted in commentary accompanying that earlier code, "Many institutions want, even expect, archivists to do research in the archives, and sometimes even make the ability and willingness to do so a qualification for employment."
Fast forward to the 2020 revision. Any mention of "research by archivists" had disappeared entirely. The new code focused on abstracted concepts: judgment, access, use, trust. Barton-Norris observed the shift this represented:
"The shift away from explicitly encouraging archivists to conduct research in their own collections signals a broader transformation in how the profession views its role in society. The historian-archivist model one that fostered active, interpretive scholarship by archivists has been replaced by a model that prioritizes custodianship, service, and institutional representation."
What was lost in this transition? The explicit recognition that the person who cares for records might also have something to say about them. That the archivist might be, in addition to a caretaker and a service provider, a thinker someone whose proximity to the materials gives them interpretive standing that is not merely institutional.
This is the same tension that independent editors navigate, often without the language to name it. When you are hired to shape someone else's words, there is always a question lurking: are you a service provider executing instructions, or are you a practitioner whose judgment about language, structure, and argument has genuine intellectual weight?
The Epistemology Behind the Archive
To understand why this question matters so deeply in archival work and why it resonates beyond the profession it helps to look at the theoretical literature on archival epistemology. In a 2019 article for Archival Science (published in 2020), Jason Lustig traced the philosophical foundations of modern archival practice back to the work of Wilhelm Dilthey, the German philosopher who sought an epistemological basis for the human sciences.
Lustig's argument "Epistemologies of the archive: toward a critique of archival reason" was that principles like provenance, respect des fonds, and the idea of custody are not neutral technical standards. They are intellectual commitments, rooted in a particular philosophical tradition, that shape what counts as evidence and how evidence can be interpreted.
"Approaching the history of archives through the framework of epistemology helps us make sense of new critiques and continued interest in archives. Despite a growing chorus of acknowledgement of archives' constructed nature, the instinct that documents provide access to the past with some kind of evidentiary value leads toward the value imbued into archives by professionals and the public alike and their continual contestation."
Lustig's point was that archives are not passive containers. They are active constructions shaped by decisions about what to collect, how to describe it, and what interpretive frameworks to apply. Recognizing this does not undermine archival authority; it makes that authority more legible and more honest.
For independent editors, this insight has practical weight. Every editorial decision which argument to strengthen, which passage to cut, which structure to recommend is also an epistemological act. It says something about what the editor believes counts as evidence, what kind of clarity serves the reader, and what shape an argument should take to be most persuasive. Naming these decisions, more than treating them as transparent technical corrections, is what separates editorial judgment from copyediting.
A Framework Called Life on File
Where does this leave someone trying to build an independent editorial practice? The theoretical literature can feel abstract fascinating, but distant from the day-to-day work of reading manuscripts, giving feedback, and building client relationships. A 2020 article in Qualitative Sociology by A.K.M. Skarpelis offers a more practical entry point.
Skarpelis developed a framework called "Life on File" a model for understanding how archival records are created, preserved, and used. The framework has three components:
- The act of recovery finding and collecting documents, records, and materials
- The turning of life into a record the process by which experience becomes paperwork
- The movement of a file from collection to preservation and use
Skarpelis designed the framework primarily for sociological research using state archives. But its structure recovery, record-making, preservation maps surprisingly well onto editorial work.
When an independent editor receives a draft manuscript, they are recovering a record. The author's text is a document shaped by choices, omissions, and constraints that the editor must learn to read. The editorial process itself is an act of record-making: the editor's feedback, suggestions, and structural recommendations become part of the document's history, contributing to the final form it will take. And the preserved artifact the published work will carry the marks of that process, visible or invisible to readers.
What Skarpelis emphasizes is that these three stages are not neutral or automatic. Each involves decisions that shape what the final record looks like and what it can be used to say. An editor who understands this framework can approach their work with more intentionality not just reacting to what is on the page, but understanding their role in shaping what the document becomes.
What This Means for ArticleSelected Readers
The conversation archivists have been having about professionalism, intellectual authority, and the limits of their own frameworks is not a niche professional debate. It is a case study in what happens when a field tries to define itself narrowly and what gets lost when practitioners accept those limits without question.
For independent editors working without institutional backing, this history offers several practical insights. First, the professional frameworks of adjacent fields can be a source of unexpected wisdom not because editors should become archivists, but because questions about custody, interpretation, and intellectual authority are questions about editorial work too. Second, the removal of research roles from the SAA's Code of Ethics is a cautionary tale: when a profession stops explicitly valuing the intellectual contributions of its practitioners, those contributions do not disappear they just become harder to name and defend. Third, the "Life on File" framework offers a concrete model for thinking about the editorial process as a form of documentary practice, with its own epistemology and its own ethical demands.
Independent editors do not have the luxury of institutional framing. No code of ethics tells their clients what to expect from their judgment. No professional association mediates their relationship to their work. What they have instead and this is both a challenge and an opportunity is the necessity of building their own frameworks, articulating their own standards, and making their intellectual contribution visible without external validation.
The archivists have been having this conversation for decades. Now independent editors are learning to join it.
The Practitioner at the Intersection
What does it look like to actually apply these ideas? The sources do not document a single named individual who explicitly built an editorial framework from archival thinking. What they document instead is a broader intellectual current the archival turn, the critique of professionalism, the recovery of archivists as researchers and thinkers that has been circulating in professional and academic literature for years.
Independent editors who encounter this literature often describe a moment of recognition. The questions they have been navigating in isolation How much interpretive authority do I have? When do my suggestions become something more than service provision? How do I communicate the intellectual value of what I do? turn out to have been the same questions archivists have been wrestling with, sometimes explicitly, sometimes between the lines of codes of ethics and theoretical articles.
The framework that emerges from this encounter is not a formal system with rules and procedures. It is more like a habit of mind: an understanding that editorial work is always also epistemological work, that every decision about a document is a decision about what counts as evidence and what counts as clarity, and that the independent editor's authority rests not on institutional backing but on the quality of their judgment and their willingness to articulate the thinking behind it.
Why This Matters
The archival profession is not known for its accessibility. Its theoretical literature lives behind paywalls; its debates happen in conference sessions and professional journals that most readers will never encounter. But the questions it has been asking about professionalism, intellectual authority, the relationship between custody and interpretation are not unique to archivists. They are versions of questions that any knowledge worker faces when they try to build a practice that is both rigorous and independent.
Lia Warner's call for a "liberatory archival practice" is a direct challenge to the idea that professionalism means narrowing your self-understanding to what your institution expects. Emma Barton-Norris's tracing of the SAA's shifting ethics codes shows how much is lost when a profession stops explicitly valuing the intellectual contributions of its members. Jason Lustig's epistemological analysis demonstrates that even seemingly technical archival standards are rooted in philosophical commitments that can be examined and questioned. And A.K.M. Skarpelis's "Life on File" framework offers a concrete model for thinking about documentary practice as a process with distinct stages, each involving its own forms of judgment and responsibility.
For independent editors, these sources do not provide a playbook. They provide something more useful: a language for talking about what they do, a history of the questions they are asking, and an argument that the intellectual contribution of practitioners who work outside institutions is not lesser than and may in some ways be freer than the contribution of those who work within them.
The archivist who turned personal notes into a framework for independent editors is not a single person. It is a collective, inchoate movement dozens of practitioners discovering, in isolation from each other, that the questions they have been asking have been answered, or at least more carefully articulated, by a profession that has been wrestling with them for decades.
Where to Read Further
The sources cited in this article are drawn from professional and academic archival literature. Several are available through institutional subscriptions, but portions may be accessible through open access channels or academic libraries:
- Lia Warner's "Archiving Against Professionalism" in RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage offers the fullest articulation of the critique of professional narrowness in archival work.
- The Committee on Ethics & Professional Conduct's "The Archivist as Researcher" essay provides essential context on how the SAA's Code of Ethics has evolved regarding archivists' intellectual roles.
- Jason Lustig's "Epistemologies of the archive" in Archival Science is a dense but rewarding piece for readers interested in the philosophical foundations of archival practice.
- A.K.M. Skarpelis's "Life on File: Archival Epistemology and Theory" in Qualitative Sociology offers the most directly applicable framework for thinking about documentary processes.