An archivist's primary responsibility is determining which records are of value. This requires a great deal of understanding of the historical context of the records in question as the historical context reveals the record's relationship to other records, the intended use of the record, and the record creator's underlying motivations. Once a record is determined to be sufficiently valuable to preserve, archivists must describe and arrange the record in such a way that the institution's intended audience is able to access the information and make sense of it. In order to successfully accomplish these tasks, one who works with archives must employ strong organizational techniques and sound management skills.

Several professional fields work closely with archives including the records manager and the historian. While there is a great deal of overlap between these professions, the goals of maintaining archives are certainly distinct. The primary duties of a records keeper include maintaining a large volume of temporary information for large institutions, whereas archives are rather small in number and are collected so that they might be maintained for a lengthy period of time. A historian's primary goal is to examine archives so that historical truths might be derived, whereas the archivist is objectively collecting the data so that it might be thoroughly researched.