Terry Eastwood
Associate Professor
School of Library, Archival and Information Studies
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC, Canada

Educating Records Professionals

SIG 1: Archival/Records, Thursday, February 13, 1997, 7:30pm - 9:00pm

In 1940 while surveying archival developments since the French Revolution, Ernst Posner looked forward to the day when "archivists will become the nation's experts who must be consulted in all questions of...record making and record keeping and likewise become the trustees who will safeguard the written monuments of the past, of the present day, and of the future." [1] Since that time, the archival profession in most countries of the world has been associated primarily with the role of cultural trustee in institutions devoted to the preservation of archives both public and private rather than the role of expert in records making and keeping. In fact, records making and keeping in active and semi-active contexts, or records management as it has most often come to be called in the English speaking world, has more often than not become a responsibility suffused throughout administration, with every office managing its own record. But, before the events which Posner reviewed and still in China and several continental European countries, archivists manage active, semi-active, and inactive records. In these contexts, the archivist is not someone working in a centralized "historical repository" who might be consulted on records matters but rather someone intimately involved in all the duties associated with creating, regulating, controlling, organizing, handling, and preserving records throughout all phases of their existence.

This paper will argue that records professionals, though they may specialize in some aspect of this continuum of records management, must be experts in all facets of the management of records, that their expertise is even more necessary than ever in the age of electronic records, and that the proper domain of their knowledge is archival science, a discipline distinct from that of other information professions and worthy of pursuit at the graduate level to equip society with a new breed of records professionals capable of overseeing the genesis, management, and preservation of the archives of public agencies and private corporate bodies.

The paper will explain models constructed to define the activities and entities involved in the genesis and preservation of an agency's archival fonds from the viewpoint of the records creator's need to control its records according to its mandate. The models interpret the principles of archival science using IDEFO modeling methodology. They will be used to illustrate the intellectual substance of the records profession's discipline, and to suggest ways to reorient its education. The models were produced in the course of research on the preservation of the integrity of electronic records conducted by the author and his colleague, Luciana Duranti, in collaboration with the United States Department of Defense.

1. Ernst Posner, "Some Aspects of Archival Development Since the French Revolution," The American Archivist 3 (July 1940): 172. [back]

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