WHY NOT “RECORDS SCIENCE”?
I know some of you are hating my harping about our profession establishing and promoting an identity of who we are and what we do. From the emails, I know that some of you are excited about the cusp of professionalism that we are perched on, ready to fall to one side or the other, depending on our reaction to our place in society RIGHT NOW.
In library school, a place normally for practical application not academic reflection, I once pondered whether there was a difference between archivist and a records manager. I made a comment in Joe
Turrini’s course that I believed the two were two branches of the same tree. Less than a year later, I met
Jac Treanor and he said they were two sides of the same coin. Regardless, archivists and records managers are the same. Records managers manage active and semi-active records (also called current records) and archivists manage inactive records (also called non-current or historical records), but it is the same records. A records manager cannot do his job without reference to what might become of the records in the future, called disposition (either destruction or archiving) and an archivist cannot do her job without reference to where the records have been before (called appraisal or context). They both work in tandem in a semi-symbiotic relationship, I believe.
Conversely, archivists and records managers are vastly different, though kissing cousins, to both historians and librarians. Historians are a different species than we are, however, as are librarians. Archivists are not failed historians and we are not special librarians (even if we sometimes are wrongly called special collections librarians). So, three animals exist in our world – animal one is called “historian,” animal two is called “librarian,” and animal three has two sub-species (“archivist” and “records manager”). My question to you is: why is there not one unified, recognized name for this one animal with two sub-species?
My answer to you is: let’s make one and call them “Records Scientists.” Let me lay out my claim with allusion to my personal experiences and then play a little on the term itself. For years, I have collected
PDF versions of published articles in the eleven (now ten) print archives journals of the English-speaking world and the few records management journals. I have about 6000 right now and have them classified and divided into around one hundred twenty
subfolders. The
subfolders, though, are put under a folder called “records science.” When I was searching for a term to put them under in 2006, all I could think of was records science. Archives
didn’t work because about half of the articles at the time were records management articles. Records management also
didn’t fit because of the reverse.
But I realized that half of the archives articles I had mentioned in some way either records management by name or alluded to some records management concept or principle. About a third of the records management articles do the opposite for archives. So I realized then they are related. Many articles, over one hundred, actually, deal with the relationship between archives and records management. So we talk about each other, why not unite in one name for our emerging profession?
Why science? Like I learned in college, archives and records management have gone from the beginning of its run as an “art” that people who were historically minded and liked to organize things could do. No longer, or at least its not supposed to be this way, do we find archivists and records managers who do their own thing, classify and describe and appraise and preserve the way they want to. We now have standards like
DACS and ISO-15489 and such. We are supposed to be doing things very similarly, with the only differences due to the type and nature of the records we manage, not our own creative twist on things. So what we are doing now is practicing a science. I think this may be one reason why library SCIENCE is so tantalizing to our archival educators – it sort of fits. But not entirely. We are a scientific profession, and more than just our educators, too.
So I am proposing to my archives management colleagues and my records management colleagues that we begin referring to ourselves as “records scientists,” who are so alike we deal with the same records, only at a different time in their life-cycle. We do so scientifically, not artistically, and we do the same things the same way.
Welcome records scientists to the new profession.
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