Many thanks to Paul Doty for leading our discussion on "Retrievers to Rhetoricians: Librarians and Online Libraries." Paul, Steve, and I are heartened by the high level of discussion on this topic. Thanks to all who participated and special thanks to Paul who suggested and developed this topic and led our two-week discussion.
We now turn to a discussion of "Reinventing Archival Education." We have two guest editors from the University of Michigan's (U-M) School of Information (SI) for our discussion -- Margaret Hedstrom and Elizabeth Yakel.
Margaret Hedstrom is an associate professor of archives and records management. Before joining the U-M/SI faculty, she served for 10 years as chief of state records advisory services at the New York State Archives and Records Administration where she founded and directed the Center for Electronic Records. She has written numerous articles on electronic records and digital preservation. She is a fellow of the Society of American Archivists and an active participant on several committees and task forces examining digital preservation and electronic records issues.
Elizabeth Yakel is a research assistant at the Collaboratory for Research in Electronic Work (CREW) and a doctoral candidate in SI at U-M. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies in 1992, she worked as an archivist and records manager for over 10 years in a number of positions, including project archivist for the Vatican Archives Project. She has written in the areas of archival cataloging, user needs, and religious archives. Elizabeth served on the Society of American Archivists' (SAA) Council (1992-95) and is currently cochair of the SAA Committee on Education and Professional Development.
Please join Margaret and Elizabeth for our discussion of "Reinventing Archival Education."
Broadly speaking, archival materials document all types of human activities on the individual as well as on a collective basis. The human record includes paper, photographs, film, artifacts, as well as digital documents. Archival methods can be used to establish intellectual and physical control over historical materials that become disarranged as a result of the ravages of time, neglect, technological obsolescence, or inappropriate human intervention. They can also be applied prospectively in the design of information systems to support records integrity and authenticity, access, and long-term preservation.
Individuals with archival knowledge and skills are employed in a wide variety of venues, including private corporations, government entities, colleges and universities, religious orders, and non-profit institutions; in special libraries, manuscript repositories, and archives devoted exclusively to preserving and providing access to archival materials; and in many other settings with substantial holdings of documentary materials or complex information management problems. Some archivists and records managers work independently as private consultants, trainers, and educators. In the digital environment, an archival perspective combined with knowledge of recordkeeping requirements, skills in assessing the long-term value of information, and expertise in long-term preservation and access are valuable assets for individuals who design, organize, or manage systems in corporations, government, and not-for-profit organizations.
Educating students to fill these varied roles is increasingly complex. Furthermore, education cannot simply focus on helping students to get their first professional position. It must prepare students to manage their careers, which will span into the mid-21st century when documentation as well as the means of accessing it will be radically different. The Society of American Archivists recently issued "Guidelines for the Development of a Curriculum for a Master of Archival Studies," popularly called the "MAS Guidelines" to increase the strength and academic rigor of archival education. (MAS Guidelines available at http://volvo.gslis.utexas.edu/~us-saa/masguide.html.) These are slowly being implemented at some universities.
For the first week, we would like to focus on what basic theoretical background and skills are necessary to prepare archivists today. Specific questions are:
I came to Pitt in 1988. Within a couple of years the suite of four archives courses (I also teach a doctoral seminar that is a fifth course) that I teach was in place -- Archives and Mss Management, Records and Information Resources Management, Archival Appraisal, and Archival Arrangement Description and Reference (another faculty member teaches two courses on preservation). While the courses have stayed intact over the past six years I realize that my course content has evolved considerably. Now I focus on records and the value of records for evidence, accountability, and corporate memory. I view the archivist as a scholar of recordkeeping and recordkeeping systems. More and more of my time is spent with electronic records issues and concerns. Anyway, you get the drift here and you read statements from me about the program as well as view my syllabi on my home page.
My concerns with what I am doing are many. Many students enter the program because of what I would term as very traditional, more manuscript curatorial interests and career objectives. While I firmly believe that one of the problems with the archivists working with historical manuscripts is that they have forgotten that personal and family manuscripts are archives, it is also obvious that students interested in more historical (sometimes almost antiquarian) pursuits tend to get frustrated and sometimes confused about the emphasis of this program. In fact, what I often find myself engaged in is trying to reinvent the students' perceptions of archives molded often by broader societal stereotypes of archives as quiet, non-threatening places to work. You can add to this similar problems with views to the matter of technology. While I am intellectually stimulated by the challenges posed by the technological challenges, the students sometimes tend to have other views; a small number actually hope to work with manuscripts in order to avoid dealing with technology.
I also wonder, as well, about what is being taught out in other programs. My sense is that many of the education programs are still heavily-oriented to arrangement and description as a function to serve historical scholars. My emphasis, while including arrangement and description, is on the broader societal and organizational importance of records and as a result I see matters like electronic records management and appraisal as far more important topics. The paucity of research coming out of archival education programs and specifically from only a few educators also makes me wonder if the majority of education programs are not too tied to functions like arrangement and description as a form of gloried internship/apprenticeship. In this sense, I do not see the SAA guidelines as the problem, but rather a combination of perceptions about archives, still traditional orientation of the programs, and the dependence on single faculty programs (the latter also having a major influence on the depth and breadth of the programs). Where I am is knowing that we must build multiple faculty programs (Pitt will likely add a second faculty member in the next year or so), recommit to scholarship and research (we are trying to build a center here that will support this), and develop strong links to the other programs in distance education to strengthen our curriculum and to perhaps contribute to a virtual archival academy.
There are other issues that concern me, but this is probably long enough. I promise to comment on some of these other issues in the discussion that follows.
I joined the Palmer School in January 1990 with the assignment of starting a program in Archives and Records Management. We continue to add to and modify the curriculum to meet the needs of a profession in transition.
Among our current courses are:
Another innovative approach has been an active collaboration with the NYU Archives Program, directed by Peter Wosh out of the history department. Our students can take each other's courses and do so on a regular basis. I look forward to deepening this relationship in the future.
Finally, the Palmer School has just put the finishing touches on a proposal for a Ph.D. program in information studies. I would hope that some of our doctoral students will explore archival issues.
We're still a young program, but I'm proud to say that this academic year we had 12 students graduate with certificates in archives.
Twenty years ago graduate archival education was populated by adjuncts with only one, maybe two exceptions. Starting in the early 1980s we began to witness a slow hiring of regular, tenure stream faculty. Now we number about fifteen or twenty in North America, but we still lack a real corporate focus. The SAA Archival Educators Roundtable, with its two-hour limit and focus on news and reports, is simply no longer what we need; it is a throwback to where we were a decade and more ago. The ALISE meeting is a possibility, although only a handful of archival educators seem to be going there (although the most recent one with me, Hedstrom, Gilliland-Swetland, Gracy, etc., in attendance gives me hope). Plans for a day long educators forum before the SAA meeting in San Diego is another way of building community.
However, it seems that there are other things we can be doing, and I post these as suggestions and questions:
Part of this I am sure is my teaching approach, but part is also due to the fact that students, trained in history, often lack experience with other research methods (social science) which would be more useful in the analysis of organizational processes and the recordkeeping systems which result from those activities. However, another part of the resistance, I think, has to do with a preconception of archivists as passive, totally non-interventionist, and shying away from interpretation. In other words, I think that the students view archivists as a means of transferring records intact, without leaving any sort of archival interpretative stamp on them. This is something which I don't believe is possible, every access tool embodies a number of interpretative decisions. The sort of research Richard and I are advocating involves a lot of intervention, analysis, and interpretation. I don't think that we are giving students the tools to do this sort of analysis. Thus far at Michigan, research methods are only covered slightly in the archival courses. Does anyone actively incorporate them into archival courses? Archvial students here also do not often take the general research methods course, although I generally recommend it. Do others push any sort of general research methods course which covers social science methodology as well as historical methodology?
It seems to me that another dividing point between current graduate archival education programs and between educators and the professional practitioners is that educators must be agents for change in the profession. First of all, we must equip future archivists for careers not to go out and just do current stuff, like processing, without helping them to a) understand the historical development of the current professional attitudes and activities b) perceive the issues, questions, problems with current practices and attitudes and c) get them to think about the changing societal and organizational environments and how they will contend with these. Second of all, we must not assume that the current archivist of the 1990s is what the archivist of the first decade of the next century will need to be. While we cannot predict precisely, I really believe that educating prospective archivists with a foundation of understanding records and recordkeeping systems, organizational theory (something that I too need to look at and explore more), and other like approaches (what are other similar innovative approaches?) will equip the graduates of the program to strengthen and change the archival professional community.
Someone might say well what needs to be changed? I submit the following as a partial list: research, understanding the users of archives, greater public understanding of archival issues, more resources, more concentrated work with electronic records, stronger advocacy. You can add to this list I am sure.
While I am a practitioner who also teaches, it is with faculty status, requiring scholarship, research, and service. Having served on the Univ. p+t committee for a couple of years, I noticed the interesting arrangement in our medical school. There we have two classes of faculty: researcher-educator and clinician-educator. Both have teaching responsibilities but the balance of patient care (practice) vs. research differs considerably. There is a role for both in a medical school. As long as the practitioner has an academic responsibility for scholarly activity, this works. I would hope that the debate over adjuncts and their role might consider this as a possible model.
My other comment (for now) relates to Richard's point on distance education. I've tried it and it works. During the fall I taught our archives course "live" at University Park and by interactive video (Pictel) for our Harrisburg campus. I did make a number of changes to make the classes as "interactive" as possible, including the use of a class newsgroup for electronic discussions and email exchanges. Students noted some of the occasional technical glitches, but the student evaluations from both ends were the highest I've ever received (6's out of 7). So the technology was not a problem and this is what the research tells us is generally the case. I am scheduled to teach by D.E. again this fall and I anticipate adding a home page and digitizing and putting some of the class materials on the web for interactive exercises (that ain't firm so don't look for details at the moment.) Taken to a larger stage, there is no reason why we should not be able to offer archival education across the country to those who can travel to sites for teleconferencing or via the net. In fact since my first class is during SAA this fall, so I'm trying to get a Pictel site in San Diego to use so I don't have to cancel the class (last fall, I drove up from Washington to Harrisburg and taught the class from there to Univ. Park).
This is certainly a challenging starter set of questions, although some are more relevant to North America than to those of us in other countries, so I will attempt Q1-3 and ignore Q4&5 as not relevant to Australia, ie., OZ.
Q1: What theories do we have about what is needed in terms of knowledge, skills, tools and attitudes?
In the late '70s and early '80s, several documents were produced with this info which, in 1991, I identified the elements and configurations they seemed to have in common and embodied them into a comprehensive Knowledge Areas document for review by archival educators around the world as part of the 12th ICA Congress. (To see the comprehensive document and the results of the survey, wade through Archivum XXXIX pp. 312-359).
The paper is very long/tedious, but there are some interesting bits, including a list of suggested possible publications and research projects (pp. 336-341).
Anyway, that snapshot of the archival knowledge base would be quite different today, and even in 1991, a few educators were moving towards integrated treatment of recordkeeping. I would be interested in the outcomes of a similar survey today.
Q2: Current state of archival education
Again, this is context specific. In OZ there is a growing CONSENSUS among educators who are participating in the discourse in OZ that our curricula should reflect the following understandings:
A. OUR MISSION is to ensure the evidence required for managerial and societal accountability and cultural continuity through comprehensive recordkeeping regimes which document the present and recover/reconstruct the past.
B. OUR IDENTITY AS AN INTEGRATED RECORDKEEPING PROFESSION is increasingly cohesive due to the shift to electronic systems, but comprises specializations:
Our OZ curriculum content should convey the above as appropriate for our context. Thus OZ education reflects:
Q3. Should we prepare students only for traditional archives?
ABSOLUTELY NOT. We must adopt a pluralistic view recognizing specializations, but primarily concentrate on core theoretical and analytical knowledge/skills/attitudes and opportunities to apply them which equip graduates for work across all strands of recordkeeping: business/regulatory & historical/cultural, both institutional/in-house & collecting. Students will have their own preferences, based upon their own abilities and gravitate into environments that fit them.
Other stuff:
OZ archival educators Web page:
You can access the Archival Educators home page at Edith Cowan University on the World Wide Web. using the URL http://liswww.fste.ac.cowan.edu.au/archives/arced/
The page was designed and is managed by Mark Brogan of Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia.
Mark welcomes contributions but asks that he receive submissions for the home page in the following formats:
>Of these formats, Acrobat PDF is the easiest to produce from a WP file (drag and drop via the distiller). If you want to produce HTML from WP copy without learning markup, get a copy of Adobe's PageMill or equivalent.
>Whether the home page survives and prospers will depend on the quality and quantity of postings made by archival educators and students. the EC staff are particularly keen to encourage students to contribute, and you might consider introducing electronic coursework into your programmes as a way of encouraging students to produce electronic copy. Since HTML is an effective SGML subset (i.e., an interoperable document standard) there may be other benefits associated with formal introduction of HTML as a preferred assignment/project authoring format. To assist students in the development of authoring skills, links to Web sites containing HTML tutorials will be included on the home page. >All ideas about how the page should be developed are of course welcome.
I would like to see the web page utilized more and plan to contribute once I learn how to use HTML. One of the things I'd like to see is a bulletin board of:
Here in OZ more than half the programs have two full-time staff. UNSW has 2.3 FTE, Monash 3.5, EC 2 and so on. However, even so, we still need to have specialists in to address specialist areas: preservation, moving images, legal requirements, etc. Also, it is important for students to have differing views, even within an individual subject. A full-time staff member is always the academic coordinator/liaison to ensure continuity and quality. We have packaged some of our specialist subjects as continuing education to bring in fees from practitioner participants. This helps offset the expense of adjuncts and brings students in contact with experienced practitioners as a reality check on theory. There are problems, of course. Mainly that the response from the practitioner community is so strong, that we scarcely have room for the students.
Important New Developments and Reports:
Two states, Victoria and NSW, are working on new comprehensive recordkeeping legislation which seek to establish effective recordkeeping regimes in government.
New OZ publications of note:
AS4390 Australian Standard on Records Management prescribing an integrated regime for recordkeeping delineating core functions of control (encompassing intellectual and physical organization and access), appraisal/disposal and storage/preservation.
Archives Authority of NSW: New Legislation and "White Papers" mandating systematic approach to recordkeeping requirements for NSW government agencies.
Australian Bureau of Statistics Draft Occupational Description for Archivist: details responsibilities commensurate with role as "enabler of access to essential evidence for personal, corporate and social memory." Australian Society of Archivists(ASA) Bulletin for February 1996 pp. 12-13.
Competency Standards for Archives/Records: This work has been ongoing now for two years, headquartered at Monash U. and is making progress to the point where a grant of $140,000 has been approved for it. A detailed report is in the ASA Bulletin for October 1995 pp. 134-141. The key draft competency areas that have been identified as core archives/records knowledge are:
I have observed an unfortunate trend with some of the best archival students here at Michigan. These students are avid learners who grasp archival theory and can articulately engage in archival discussion by the time they graduate. They are also very versed in computer applications, and perhaps spoiled by the technology available at the University of Michigan. When they go out and get their first archival positions, they become bored and frustrated. In fact, several of these students have left the archival profession to work in library settings or other information environments where their skills and minds are more actively engaged. I find this trend disheartening and have been very sorry to see several of the students effectively move out of the profession. While this may not be a permanent move, I fear that it will be and that it will be hard for these individuals to break back into the profession without the traditional skills, experiential requirements which most job ads contain. I am very concerned about this attrition problem.
I want to thank everyone for commenting on the questions and providing reports of different archival programs during week one of the discussion on "Reinventing Archival Education." I will start out the second week with some additional comments and questions. I hope that we will hear more from last weeks respondents and hear more about other archival programs in this our last week of discussion on this topic.
Traditionally, there have been a number of different educational paths which individuals could pursue to become an archivist. History, American culture, and public history departments, as well as schools of library and information science have offered archival courses. However, there have been relatively few archival "programs" (as opposed to course offerings). One could now argue that the strongest archival programs are developing in library schools, but the relationship between archival and library educators has been strained. Furthermore, archival students are requiring training in broader areas than library and information science and history. For example, the SAA MAS Guidelines note the importance of legal knowledge, organizational theory, and management science.
My thinking along these lines is that we should explore ways to strengthen the teaching of archival science as a discipline. I think that this has a number of implications for the curriculum, the selection of students, and the objectives for graduate education. If we take a disciplinary approach, this would mean teaching the basic principles of the discipline to all prospective students in information science. It might also mean building more education on archival science into other academic programs (public policy, business, and computer science come to mind). We would also expect the educated people who do not identify themselves as archivists would have enough knowledge of archival theory and principles to apply it in a wide variety of settings.
The advantage to this approach is that it would reach a much larger audience -- and an audience of people whose decisions and actions might have a profound impact on archiving. Of course, it also has disadvantages. Such a program may not be compatible with professional education. It might erode the sense of professional identity that students gain from a professional program.
But then I am wondering whether the professional and disciplinary models are inherently contradictory or whether it would be possible to do both.
Especially students with a keen interest in becoming archivists, librarians or documentalists should bear in mind that individual interests may alter during professional life. In addition, professional perspectives, roles and expectations shift constantly. And some vacant working opportunities demand a double, if not a multiple qualification.
Consequently, graduates which have reasonably chosen elective courses or practiced outside the mainstream of their curriculum, have certain advantages: Entering into professional life, facing changes within the own profession or getting an employment in a different branch of the information professions, it may turn out to be useful or even necessary to dispose of knowledge and abilities surpassing the faculties acquired through a circumscript specialization.
First, I can attest personally to the value of being able to sit down and meet with multiple faculty archives programs in Australia. When I visited there June, July, and August 1995, it was quite valuable to be able to sit down with such faculties at their schools and to see the advantages they had in developing a curriculum, doing joint-research, and team teaching to emphasize both strengths and to build on a foundation of strengths and diverse interests.
Second, this is in direct contrast to what we can do at the moment in US-based programs. The suggestion that we can build a kind of multiple faculty program with one regular archives faculty member who then coordinates with adjuncts may be doable in a sense, but it is far from ideal. We want faculty who have established research interests and activities, who can approach their teaching from a broader view of knowledge not just from the vantage of their own institution, and who have some credibility for promoting the development of a comprehensive graduate archives program within a particular school. It is the rare adjunct who can fit into our programs in such a fashion.
Third, we also need to move away from too heavy a dependence on adjuncts in order to show the contrast between programs with regular faculty and those lacking such faculty who have only adjuncts. The later can develop only to a very limited extent, and it is the target for writings by individuals like Burker (1981) on archival theory, Conway (1988) on the need for full-time educators, and Ericson (1988 and 1992) revealing the unevenness of attention to the full range of archival functions. This is why we should pressure SAA to develop an education directory with at least three categories -- programs meeting the new guidelines, programs with regular faculty not meeting but working toward the guidelines, and "programs" staffed only by adjuncts. The same directory should also feature a brief statement of philosophy about the nature and purpose of the archival education program.
First, I heartily endorse Margaret Hedstrom's concept of disciplinary education. Let me go beyond her statement of "building more education on archival science into other academic programs" by arguing that we should even be trying to build full "programs" in these other venues. While building stronger interdisciplinary connections between traditionally located archival education programs with business or public policy schools is important (anyone want to comment on such activity?), I also believe that establishing archival programs "in" such schools is a realistic and valuable objective. If we could establish a full archival education program in business schools we might have a more profound influence on establishing and nurturing corporate archives. The same could be said for other areas as well. Teaching archival science in such a venue could have the advantage of allowing one to build focused case studies and the like. Moving in this direction might also have the added benefit of ending the tired and useless debate about the location of archival education in history versus library/information science schools; these debates reveal more now about the insecurities and other problems of the debaters than they do about the substance of the core knowledge.
Dean DeBolt made reference to the use of new methods of information retrieval and the impact on archival description in his posting, stressing the need "to embed important key words and phrases" in the electronic or digital archives. Let me stress that the first thing we need to do is stress the essence of the archival record and basic archival principles before grasping onto new technologies. This is the value and mandate for developing full archival education programs. For example, being able to do keyword searching is of no value whatsoever unless the full value of a record -- its structure, content, and context -- is managed; I have seen archivists playing with new approaches at the expense of the integrity of the record, that is, over-emphasizing content when only content minimizes the value of the record for evidence. So, while archivists certainly need "a grounding in information science as well as thesaurus studies" they first need a grounding in archival science.
Here at Monash, as many of you will know from the recent visit of Sue McKemmish to U.S.A. and Canada, we have implemented the notion of disciplinary education outlined by Margaret in her comments. We teach "recordkeeping" rather than archives or records management. In comparison to our American colleagues I feel privileged to teach with three other archival educators on the same academic staff.
Using the recordkeeping framework, we are reintegrating the basic theories, knowledge, skills and techniques associated with recordkeeping across all activities rather than perpetrating what we see as a false distinction between records management and archives administration. It is based on the premise of records as evidence -- of transactions, of activities, of functions, and of organizational structures including individuals, organizations and broader societal or juridical structures. This theoretic construct is being best articulated by Frank Upward and Sue McKemmish in their expositions of the records continuum.
This year, we have based our teaching around this model and are teaching the knowledge and skills required to work across each of the dimensions of the continuum. This re-thinking of our theoretical base consciously rejects the notion of lifecycle and allows us to do some quite interesting and extraordinary things. It has been possible this year to start teaching our primary professional qualification, the graduate diploma, from the premise of electronic recordkeeping and teach back to paper recordkeeping models (our premise is that if you can work effectively in electronic systems then you can work effectively in paper systems). We don't know yet how effectively we are doing this, but the students seem motivated, connected and enthusiastic.
The notion of recordkeeping being something that everybody in society is involved in, is very central to the model. Using this approach, we are introducing recordkeeping concepts into first year undergraduate programmes in information management. We are also set to teach a subject into the masters of computing. The model and approach is also permitting us to venture more widely and propose recordkeeping electives or modules to particular professional groups different to our own -- to teach recordkeeping into law courses and into medical courses, for example.
We are all quite inspired by the way the records continuum model is changing our perspectives, and we are getting considerable support from the professional community of archivists for this approach and from other professional groups. (Much of the AS 4390 Australian Records Management Standard is based on work and thinking coming out of the application of these models.)
To give you an example related to Dean de Bolt's posting on thesaurus control, we are defining documentation across the continuum as one of the recordkeeping processes. This involves defining what should be created as records (involving a combination of knowledge of organizational theory, systems analysis and design, legislative analysis, risk analysis and some of the knowledge base previously associated with appraisal), how they should be maintained (involving more systems design stuff and skills that in records management would be called classification and indexing, security controls, contextual information available at the time of creation), and skills to ensure that access can be gained to the records over time (previously segmented in archival arrangement and description). This involves acknowledgement of the fact that language and concepts change with time and that we need ways of maintaining access to concepts and language which have changed -- so that the `communications technologies' are associated, over time, to concepts of `information superhighway' or `child crime' of the nineteenth century are associated with `child welfare' in the twentieth century. Such endeavors require quite sophisticated knowledge of classification and thesaurus tools.
At the same time as trying to reintegrate many of the fragmented skills of recordkeeping we are very conscious that recordkeeping forms part of information science and so are carefully grounding our discipline as a specialization within a larger disciplinary area.
Its exciting stuff and I'd be interested to hear your reactions.
Recent shifts from adjunct to ladder faculty teaching, and from sequences of three (or fewer) courses to those with six or more plus outside electives are indications of some maturation in graduate archival education in the larger academic programs in the U.S. Such shifts, are, however, merely the tip of the iceberg of what graduate archival programs should be seeking to cover and accomplish. I would not take issue with Luciana Duranti's comment that archival science is a discipline and the core of a body of knowledge that uniquely identifies the archival profession, and it is my strong hope that archival education in the United States can build a more rigorous disciplinary base that comes closer to the Canadian model. At the same time, however, I believe that archival educators should be actively involved not only in teaching archival science and preparing future archival professionals (locally and cooperatively through distance education, but also in establishing their programs as centres of empirical research on archival issues, and the application of archival theory and practice to areas such as business administration, organizational theory, information policy development, digital multimedia development, and K-12 education.
All this requires the development of strong doctoral programs focused around research, and innovative and flexible masters' programs that move above and beyond the "vanilla" graduate education recommended in the MAS guidelines. It also involves preparing graduate students to assume positions that are emerging in which they can apply "traditional" archival theory and practice in "non-traditional" ways (e.g., as metadata specialists) by nurturing confidence in their archival foundations, leadership skills, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
Diversity in graduate archival education is also an important way to strengthen the development of the archives profession. Indeed, as our parent institutions focus increasingly upon strengthening and emphasizing those areas in which they excel, I believe that we too should begin to consider how our archives programs might not only survive in the current academic economic environment, but thrive, by promoting the areas in which they can excel. In other words, while not only working to cover and expand the core disciplinary components, archival programs should be developing their own identities that build on existing strengths and incorporate emerging areas. In this respect, as a result of our Department's position within the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, its proximity to an increasingly digital entertainment industry, and the Department's own historical strength in description and organization of information resources, we believe some of the strengths and potential of UCLA's archives and preservation education and research activities lie in enhancement and assessment of archival description, integration of primary sources into K-12 curricula and interactive technology, and digital film archives.
Perhaps I should say a bit more at this point about the developing archives and preservation specialization within UCLA's Department of Library and Information Science. We are fortunate in that we have two ladder faculty whose specific teaching and research areas are archival administration, electronic records management, digital multimedia, and preservation (Gilliland-Swetland and Cloonan). We have ladder faculty with teaching and research interests in description and organization of non-book media (Leazer), archival history (Richardson), and historical methods (Maack). Our companion Department of Education also has faculty with research interests in systems design for, and the use of, archival and museum materials in educational settings.
The specialization that is being phased in over the next year will comprise a range of courses, experiential components, and research opportunities at master's (two-year program), post-master's, and doctoral levels. Archival and preservation courses include "American Archives and Manuscripts," "Records and Information Resources Management," "Practicum in Archival Processing and Reference," "Management of Digital Records," "Issues and Problems in Preservation of Library and Archival Materials," "Advanced Seminar in Archival Appraisal," and the "Development of Multimedia Cultural Resources." Students will also required to take research methods and statistics as well as other core requirements and recommended electives in library and information science; and to select additional courses in American law, film and television curatorship, history of science, management, sociology, history, and interdisciplinary studies programs that are offered in other UCLA departments and schools.
Students are strongly encouraged to avail themselves of one or more internship opportunities available at over 250 sites in the Los Angeles area. Internships sites include Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the RAND Corporation, the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Times, Walt Disney Imagineering, Dreamworks SKG, Warner Brothers, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the American Film Institute, the Japanese American National Museum, UCLA Special Collections, and the Huntington Library.
Master's students have a choice of creating a portfolio and/or preparing a thesis in order fulfill their degree requirements. Joint degree programs with History, Latin American Studies, and the Anderson Graduate School of Management also are available.
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