What is the difference between an archivist and a records manager?

Archivists and records managers are closely related professions that often work side by side, but they focus on different points in the life of a record and pursue different goals. The simplest way to understand the difference is to think about the records lifecycle: records managers concentrate on records while they are active and serving day-to-day business needs, while archivists care for the small portion of records judged to have enduring value long after their original use has ended.

What a records manager does

A records manager oversees records from creation through final disposition. Their work is grounded in business, legal, and regulatory requirements. Typical responsibilities include:

• Developing retention schedules that say how long each type of record must be kept and when it may be destroyed.
• Classifying records and applying consistent filing and metadata practices.
• Ensuring records remain accessible, authentic, and reliable while they are needed.
• Coordinating defensible disposition, including secure destruction or transfer.

The records manager’s emphasis is efficiency, compliance, and risk reduction. Most records are eventually destroyed under an approved schedule; only a fraction are kept permanently.

What an archivist does

An archivist preserves and provides access to records selected for long-term or permanent retention because of their historical, cultural, legal, or evidential significance. Core activities include appraisal (deciding what is worth keeping forever), arrangement and description, preservation and conservation, and helping researchers discover and use the materials. Archivists think in terms of context and provenance, ensuring that future users can understand where a record came from and trust its authenticity over decades.

Where they overlap

The two roles meet at the moment of disposition. When a retention schedule marks records as having permanent value, the records manager transfers them to an archives, and the archivist takes custody. Good practice links the two: appraisal decisions made early by records managers shape what archivists later preserve. Both professions value authenticity, integrity, and accessibility, and both increasingly manage born-digital content, which blurs old boundaries.

In short, a records manager keeps the right records for the right amount of time to support an organization’s operations and compliance, while an archivist ensures the most valuable records survive and remain usable for the long term.

For related guidance, see the archives and preservation topic hub.