Development Situation And Roles Orientation Of Archival Profession In The Knowledge-based Society

As an important form of social profession, archival profession has a very long history. The development of archival profession and the future of archivists have never been paid so much attention as today. What about the situation of archival profession in the knowledge society with knowledge-based economy? How to keep the sustainable development of archival profession in a good order? The research on subjects and issues are of great importance in current archival studies.This article starts from the retrospection of the origin and historical development of archival profession through analyzing the four ancient countries Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Rome and Ancient China. With particular reference to the classical and cutting-edge theories of archival studies and according to the latest investigation on archival profession in and out of China, this article discusses the development trend, features and roles of archival profession in the knowledge-based society. The investigation focuses on the archivists working in the government, companies, social groups, the students majoring in archival science and also some people working in the close profession e.g., the librarians and museum-related historians.This article analyzes the sustainable development of archival profession by illustrating the possible strength, weakness, opportunities, challenges and initial strategy. Major functions of archival profession in knowledge-based society are mainly in the fields of social memory, information spread, publicizing and education, social leisure function and etc. Major Roles of archivists in the knowledge-based society will be the keeper of physical archives, the defender of social memory, the protector of social history, the expert on archival information management, the agency of archival information, the participant of knowledge service, and the educator and producer of archival culture etc.This article mainly takes the research methods such as the principle of social studies and management science, the historical analyses, the comparing analyses, SWOT analyses and different investigation methods etc.With the author lacking of enough knowledge and capacity, this article may contains lots of flaws and mistakes. I would like to offer a few commonplace remarks by way of introduction so that others may come up with more valuable opinions. I will welcome any opinion or advice you would like to share with me on this article or related subject. I also sincerely hope that this article will be of some help to the professional development of archivists in the knowledge-based society.