Does this sound like you, your thoughts? It would be fun to clean out Grandpa's garage. We have a lot to learn from the past. I have all my music organized six different ways for instant access. I prefer to spend my free time at museums and libraries. My favorite station is The History Channel.

If you do, you may have the makings of an archival professional.

Archival professionals preserve primary sources of history - records and documents created by people in the past - so that they can be accessed and interpreted by people today. Archivists share similarities with librarians and historians, but have their own special niche. They are the ones who provide the clues to see how we got to where we are today. Their methods let people get inside the heads of those who went before us, by letting the sources speak for themselves and not imposing contemporary notions on them. It's the closest you can get to actual time travel, and archival professionals are the ones at the controls.

Though relatively few in numbers, members of this field have enormous influence. They are the caretakers of history, passing on to the future what is considered important. Along the way, they help society rediscover itself. There is scarcely a sector in popular culture today that is not touched by the work done in archives and libraries. Films are released on DVD with the original trailers, publicity stills, and trimmed footage. Box sets bring together alternate takes and home recordings. The designs of Frank Lloyd Wright decorate ties and glassware. Shoes with platform soles harken back to the 1970s. Chrysler uses hot rod designs as inspiration for the PT Cruiser. Comfort foods like meatloaf and mashed potatoes made from grandma's original recipes are dished up in restaurants.

Archival professionals do more than make the past available. They are the ones answering the question, how do we save what's important of the present? How do we preserve the primary sources of today's history? How do we take the multiplicity of electronic and computer formats and make sense of them to users in the future when today's hardware will be obsolete? Do we translate them into a more standard interface, equivalent to microfilming fragile papers? Does that take anything away from the integrity and authenticity of the original? The rules for 21st century record keeping are being worked right now. The way we will be perceived centuries from now rests on the decisions of archivists and the other professionals who will be described in this report.