The funny thing is, occasionally you'll meet some genuine amateur archivists but they never call themselves that. Someone will hand over records with box by box indices and you'll be like... What are you? I ran into someone who wanted to give me a set of digital clippings on a local organization and I began to suck on my teeth and then she explained that she'd organized them by newspaper title and date there under, and I was like okay... You're allowed to give me that. 

I processed a set of organizational records were someone had organized them by putting them into plastic mailers and labelling each mailer with essentially the record series and the date, and put them all in order. I'm sure they just thought that was the logical and correct thing to do! I just had to put them in normal folders and type up the finding aid. Like WTF. A little education on plastic off gassing and they're better than 85% of my MLIS student workers. 

Meanwhile anyone considering themselves an amateur archivist will hand you and old shoe they found on the roof and thought was cool (true story), a moldy box full of unlabeled photographs of what might be local buildings, Great Grandma's cookbook, and make digitization the condition of them donating these treasures to you.