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I think being an archivist sounds like a good fit for him given his interests. It's a concrete way of dealing with history, of understanding history and protecting history.

Both LC and NARA have online options to work with some materials as a citizen - NARA has the citizen archivist projects and LC has "By the People". Those are obviously rooted in American history, but it's a good way to take a look at the kinds of materials libraries and archives have. The Chronicling America website is also a good look at key material for many historians and archivists - newspapers. It's our online historical newspaper collection. We have guides by subject as an interesting way to dip your toes in:

A timely example would be Titanic! As it set sail 112 years ago today.

Each topic has a brief introduction and timeline, and then a page with search strategies and example articles. Onsite, we have those historical newspapers that we have preserved and stored safely, so researchers can look at them in person (Titanic is extremely popular, as are the JFK and Kennedy assassinations). So there's a wide range of tasks that archivists can do - physical material, research, digital storage, etc. It was also kind of trippy but cool to try to discern what would be historically relevant as it was happening - COVID was one thing where we were trying to track down papers that highlighted a variety of reactions across the US. January 6th was another.

ChronAm is also an excellent resource for any history paper, lol.