and legal knowledge, they are strongly rooted on traditional archival knowledge
(including diplomatics) and in part reflect the figure of the traditional archivist.
Nevertheless, some professional profiles are growing stronger and the demand
for these types of professionals has surpassed the demand for archivists. I am
specifically referring to records managers and digital forensics experts, who
are at this time insistently lobbying for dedicated degrees in their disciplines
that provide rigorous education in theory and methods. Interestingly, records
managers are increasingly becoming interested in long term preservation and
digital forensics experts in the nature of records and in recordkeeping, and this
of course complements the archivists' growing concern with records creation and
management and with records accuracy, reliability, and authenticity. Consistently
with these developments, integrity of systems and of the records created and/
or maintained in them is a paramount concern for all records professionals.25
Because of this increasing integration in the intellectual and methodological
armour of the records professions of bodies of knowledge grown separately,
my proposal responds to the demands of academia, which expects to educate
scholars active in interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary environments, and
meets the professional need of developing new knowledge that would produce
scholarly writings on leading edge concepts capable, in general, of expanding
and enriching all records disciplines, and, in particular, of developing the theory
of records management and records forensics on the basis of diplomatic and
archival theory.
For a long time records professionals, be they archivists or records managers, have
thought that their professional identity and their disciplinary body of knowledge
was going to be lost in a nondescript entity called information, and that the
preponderance of information managers profiles, information studies programs,
information related journals, and information departments or "I" schools would
have eliminated any specific kind of records professional title, any established
records discipline, any archival or records management (and library) program,
any disciplinary scholarly journal, and any department or school identified by the
name of the profession(s) it intended to educate. I believe that we are beginning
to see a reverse current, and that the challenges presented by contemporary
records are obliging us to go back to the distinctive theories of individual
disciplines, to find real interdisciplinarity in the analytical comparison of ideas
from separate fields and in bringing concepts of one field to bear on another by
reshaping and developing them to make them consistent with the theory of the
latter, to abandon generalization for specialization, and to forego the minimum
common denominator of information in favour of strong professional identities
and well defined expertises. Perhaps it is time to move from "I" schools to "X"
schools and educate extreme professionals with clear and meaningful names and
a body of knowledge that has not only breadth, but also depth and accuracy.26
LUCIANA DURANTI EDUCATING THE EXTREME RECORDS PROFESSIONAL: A PROPOSAL
24 The University of British Columbia offers a specialization on Human-Computer Interaction within the
archival program, in collaboration with the Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre (MAGIC). See
http://www.slais.ubc.ca/programs/hci.htm (last accessed January 24, 2010).
25 For the elements of contact between diplomatics and digital forensics, especially with respect to the inte
grity of records and records systems, see Luciana Duranti, "From Digital Diplomatics To Digital Forensics,1
cited.
26 Mariella Guercio reminds us of these words, "breadth, depth and accuracy," which were used by Giorgio
Cencetti in 1955 to describe the ideal program of education for archivists, in her article "I soggetti della
formazione archivistica in Italia: le universita," Archivi Computer xviii, 2-3 (2008): 29.
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