Although revealing the spatial-temporal characteristics of soil microbial community is a core goal in microbial ecology, the unavailability of fresh soil samples or cryopreserved soil samples greatly limits our understanding of changes in the structure and function of the soil microbial community. Archived soils, from soil research institutions or soil museums, make it possible to delineate microbial community dynamics from the 1840s up to now. However, almost all studies on the microbial community structure in archived soils either focused solely on the microbial community of historical soils or simply compared modern soils with historical soils. The discernment capacity of the archived soils in relation to microbial community variation was confirmed only among fertilization treatments, soil types, and geographical distance. Thus, it has not been possible to distinguish the effects of long-term environmental changes and human activities (what we want to know) during the air-drying and archiving process (what we usually ignore). This limits the use of archived soils from field experiments to examine the long-term effects of environmental parameters on soil microbial community. The main objectives of this study were to (1) investigate the microbial community dynamics during air-drying and archiving process, using soils under long-term different fertilization treatments (Chapter 2), and from different geographical locations (Chapter 4); (2) characterize the microbial community in both fresh and long-term archived soil profile samples under common conditions in microbial ecology study (Chapter 3); and (3) assess the potential of retrieving the soil microbial community from the air-dried and archived soils.