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Monday, October 12, 2009
SAA 75th Anniversary Task Force
Though the group does not officially exist for a little less than a month from now, I wanted to let all SAA members out there know that there is now a task force that has been created to plan the 75th anniversary of SAA, which I hope will be a year-long (2011) celebration. I have been appointed to the task force and I am really looking forward to working on this project. I am not sure who any of the other members are nor who will lead the group, but it will assuredly be a whiz-bang of a time!
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Why Not "Records Science"?
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Generations of Archivists In Same Family???
During a recent email discussion with Todd Gilliam, he brought up a point I had honestly never considered in regard to professionalism among archivists and in the archival profession. Todd asked me why there was no tradition of parent-child archivists. What he meant by this is why there are not more children of archivists who become archivists themselves.
Doctors have such familial pairs - everyone knows stories about father/son doctors. Lawyers and architects and accountants, too, have parent/child professionals working side by side. The child eventually takes over the practice of the parent.
In my decade in the profession, as a student then an archivist then a records manager then a student again then an archivist and now a consultant, I have heard of only one such pairing - a father/daughter archivist pair out of Pittsburgh, though I only have this on anecdotal authority. Why are there not more?
I have argued for many months about our archivist occupation becoming a profession and what we need to do in order to get us to the point where we truly are a profession in every sense of the word. I will continue in that vein here and then present sections of a paper I wrote for publication that will never make it there (in print) because it, too, is only opinion. Needless to say, Todd's question struck a big chord with me and caused me to re-examine my whole thesis about archivists as a profession.
The struggle of any occupation to be considered a profession, historically (teachers, for example, or nurses) is that the occupation must be firmly grounded in the operations of the society. In Great Britain, when there were professions, trades, and labor jobs, the professions were limited: lawyer, doctor, architect and accountant. Only these four could rightly use the "Esquire" or "Esq." after their names on the shingle they hung in front of their place of business. Now we have other professions, at least in America - teachers and nurses, for instance. Librarians could also be called a profession, I think. But not archivists; not yet, anyway.
I have known among librarians, for example, seven pairs of mother/daughter and one pair of mother/son librarians. The parents were so instrumental in doing what they did that they had children follow them. I'm sure there are many more such examples among librarians. But why not archivists?
Carrying the torch from generation to generation is something professions do. They don't reinvent themselves every generation or so like we archivists have done. In the 1930s we took care of governmental records, then along came special collections librarians to join the ranks and we added their expertise in personal and family papers to the fold. Then we added museum archivists, then records managers, and along the way other information professionals. Each time someone was added to the list, the profession reinvented itself.
Trends also redefined us. At first we collected just the top-heavy stuff, then Helen Samuels came along and she and others developed the concept of "documentation strategy." Then machine-readable records, then digital records, and now Kate Theimer has brought us up to Archives 2.0 and all the wonderful things it contains.
And we were redefined from without, as well. Archival literature is replete with statements of how archivists used to be considered historians who could not do history. Then we were the "special" librarians. Now, as we struggle to identify ourselves, we still have growing pains that we can't cope with, I believe.
I noticed at the roundtable meetings this past month at SAA 2010 in Austin that the numbers of persons attending the meetings of the Metadata and Digital Objects Roundtable, EAD Roundtable, and Archivists Toolkit Roundtable were astoundingly high, which is a good thing. But the other roundtables suffered in their attendance. Are we reinventing ourselves again? Is paper dead? Do we know all there is to know about paper archivism? Why so much interest in electronic records? I'm not complaining, but are we reinventing ourselves again? Will there be another splinter group like the recorded sound archivists or the women religious archivists?
The problem of identification for archivists is not just in the United States, though, but is something we suffer along with our international colleagues. Canada has had a radical shift in thinking with the concept of "Total Archives" and Australia has turned our occupation on its head with the Records Continuum. We can't even agree on something seemingly as simple as standardized description, so we have RAD and DACS. If we cannot agree on these fundamentals of who we are, how can we convince our Western society that we should be called and treated as a profession?
I am sure some progressive archivists out there will disagree with this question on principle, but: how can becoming and being an archivist be seen as a noble goal for one who is searching for a place to belong in the professional world if we are so divided over our fundamentals? Another controversial question: how can we be a noble profession if becoming a member can take so many paths. You are a doctor with an MD or a DO. You are an attorney with a JD. You are an accountant if you have a CPA. You are a librarian if you have an MLS. But to be an archivist you don't need an MA in history or an MLS with archival courses - all you have to do is demonstrate your ability to perform a skill set and have a college degree (see the A*CENSUS to see how many have a BA or BS only). Demonstrating a skill set is NOT a professional endeavor, it is a guild act, a trade skill performance. If we cannot unite behind one education offering to become members of our profession, then what can we do?
The next couple of weeks I am going to be concentrating on trying to figure out what we need to do in order to become a profession and stop being a jumble of mixed-educated laborers with no consistent education, training, or professional identity.
We cannot expect our children to follow in our footsteps and become archivists like us if we can't even tell them what an archivist is and how one becomes an archivist and what archivists do for society.
Doctors have such familial pairs - everyone knows stories about father/son doctors. Lawyers and architects and accountants, too, have parent/child professionals working side by side. The child eventually takes over the practice of the parent.
In my decade in the profession, as a student then an archivist then a records manager then a student again then an archivist and now a consultant, I have heard of only one such pairing - a father/daughter archivist pair out of Pittsburgh, though I only have this on anecdotal authority. Why are there not more?
I have argued for many months about our archivist occupation becoming a profession and what we need to do in order to get us to the point where we truly are a profession in every sense of the word. I will continue in that vein here and then present sections of a paper I wrote for publication that will never make it there (in print) because it, too, is only opinion. Needless to say, Todd's question struck a big chord with me and caused me to re-examine my whole thesis about archivists as a profession.
The struggle of any occupation to be considered a profession, historically (teachers, for example, or nurses) is that the occupation must be firmly grounded in the operations of the society. In Great Britain, when there were professions, trades, and labor jobs, the professions were limited: lawyer, doctor, architect and accountant. Only these four could rightly use the "Esquire" or "Esq." after their names on the shingle they hung in front of their place of business. Now we have other professions, at least in America - teachers and nurses, for instance. Librarians could also be called a profession, I think. But not archivists; not yet, anyway.
I have known among librarians, for example, seven pairs of mother/daughter and one pair of mother/son librarians. The parents were so instrumental in doing what they did that they had children follow them. I'm sure there are many more such examples among librarians. But why not archivists?
Carrying the torch from generation to generation is something professions do. They don't reinvent themselves every generation or so like we archivists have done. In the 1930s we took care of governmental records, then along came special collections librarians to join the ranks and we added their expertise in personal and family papers to the fold. Then we added museum archivists, then records managers, and along the way other information professionals. Each time someone was added to the list, the profession reinvented itself.
Trends also redefined us. At first we collected just the top-heavy stuff, then Helen Samuels came along and she and others developed the concept of "documentation strategy." Then machine-readable records, then digital records, and now Kate Theimer has brought us up to Archives 2.0 and all the wonderful things it contains.
And we were redefined from without, as well. Archival literature is replete with statements of how archivists used to be considered historians who could not do history. Then we were the "special" librarians. Now, as we struggle to identify ourselves, we still have growing pains that we can't cope with, I believe.
I noticed at the roundtable meetings this past month at SAA 2010 in Austin that the numbers of persons attending the meetings of the Metadata and Digital Objects Roundtable, EAD Roundtable, and Archivists Toolkit Roundtable were astoundingly high, which is a good thing. But the other roundtables suffered in their attendance. Are we reinventing ourselves again? Is paper dead? Do we know all there is to know about paper archivism? Why so much interest in electronic records? I'm not complaining, but are we reinventing ourselves again? Will there be another splinter group like the recorded sound archivists or the women religious archivists?
The problem of identification for archivists is not just in the United States, though, but is something we suffer along with our international colleagues. Canada has had a radical shift in thinking with the concept of "Total Archives" and Australia has turned our occupation on its head with the Records Continuum. We can't even agree on something seemingly as simple as standardized description, so we have RAD and DACS. If we cannot agree on these fundamentals of who we are, how can we convince our Western society that we should be called and treated as a profession?
I am sure some progressive archivists out there will disagree with this question on principle, but: how can becoming and being an archivist be seen as a noble goal for one who is searching for a place to belong in the professional world if we are so divided over our fundamentals? Another controversial question: how can we be a noble profession if becoming a member can take so many paths. You are a doctor with an MD or a DO. You are an attorney with a JD. You are an accountant if you have a CPA. You are a librarian if you have an MLS. But to be an archivist you don't need an MA in history or an MLS with archival courses - all you have to do is demonstrate your ability to perform a skill set and have a college degree (see the A*CENSUS to see how many have a BA or BS only). Demonstrating a skill set is NOT a professional endeavor, it is a guild act, a trade skill performance. If we cannot unite behind one education offering to become members of our profession, then what can we do?
The next couple of weeks I am going to be concentrating on trying to figure out what we need to do in order to become a profession and stop being a jumble of mixed-educated laborers with no consistent education, training, or professional identity.
We cannot expect our children to follow in our footsteps and become archivists like us if we can't even tell them what an archivist is and how one becomes an archivist and what archivists do for society.
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