Ema Umek was born on the 14th of April 1929 in Ljubljana. In 1952 she took her university diploma from general and national history, and geography at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. After a year of teaching she was from the 1st of Sept. 1953 to her retirement in 1988 employed in the Archive of SR Slovenia.
For long she worked on archival records for the time before World War I. She wrote inventories of some convents, a survey of archival collections in the Archive of SR Slovenia. Her work on recording abroad archival materials for the history of Slovenes is also important. To be mentioned is her pedagogical work at the History Dept. of the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana where she lectured archivisties. To be pointed out are her articles and treatises from agrarian history, the history of water traffic along the Sava and Ljubljanica rivers, and pubiication of historical sources.