(e.g. computer science and business administration), and, last but not least,
with the market, in terms of quantity and types of available jobs for graduates
and, consequently, of number of potential applicants to graduate programs,
considerations which increasingly condition university offerings. Thus, these
debates center on whether academia should provide strictly professional
education or should form researchers, scholars in the records disciplines;
whether it is possible to deliver an education which has both breadth of scope
and depth of knowledge, and is able to incorporate the knowledge of information
technologies not as instruments or tools but as agents of change of the nature of
records and records professionals, and themselves subjects of scholarly research.
These new debates are harder to resolve because of the pressure exercised on
graduate programs, on the one hand, by the universities, which compete for
funds delivered to them on the basis of the scholarly research they produce and
the number of students they graduate, and, on the other hand, by professional
associations that ask for dedicate graduate education in their specific field—for
example, records management—promising to provide those high numbers of
students that are so important to get university funding, but requesting at the
same time an educational focus on professional practices that would nullify
the attainment of those numbers, if implemented. What is the answer to these
troubling dichotomies? It might be helpful to look at the educational principles
on which most educators seem to agree and then at the demands placed on
tomorrow's records professionals in order to establish what should be essential
and what can be optional in a program of graduate education for records
professionals.
Educational principles
The three educational principles that are generally shared are the following:
1) records professionals must be educated in the core knowledge that identifies
their profession, that is, on the theory of the records and on the methods of
their work; 2) they must be educated in international standards as well as in the
specific, local and unique aspects of the records of the juridical-administrative
environment in which they will work; and 3) they must be educated in the
practical as well as the scholarly nature of their work.14 Naturally, the last of
these principles is the most important for university programs. Research is a
critical component of a graduate level program because it is an expression of
the intellectual nature of the records disciplines, the scholarly substance of the
work that record professionals do, and the status of records studies with respect
to other graduate programs. Several course offerings can enable students to
engage in scholarly enquiry of various kinds, from the thesis to directed research
LUCIANA DURANTI EDUCATING THE EXTREME RECORDS PROFESSIONAL: A PROPOSAL
14 Luciana Duranti, "Models of Archival Education: Four, Two, One or a Thousand?" Archives <Sz Social Studies:
A Journal of Interdisciplinary Research, 1, 1 (2007): 1-21. Also at http://socialstudies.cartagena.es/images/
PDF/noO/duranti_models.pdf (last accessed on January 22, 2010). See also Michael Cook, Guidelines for
Curriculum Development in Records Management and the Administration of Modern Archives: A RAMP Study
(Paris: Unesco, 1982), 2. These guidelines have largely inspired the Association of Canadian Archivists gui
delines, which are still in effect in Canada: The Education Committee, Association of Canadian Archivists,
"Guidelines for the Development of a Two-Year Curriculum for a Master of Archival Studies Programme
(December 1988)," Archivaria 29 (Winter 1989-90): 128-141.
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