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.