different traditions and working environments, and the fact that at that moment in a number of countries, education programmes were strongly influencing the definition of the profile and not the contrary. The academic approach was still predominant, and in some cases, the archivist was considered as a researcher before being a professional. Moreover, having considered different existing models throughout Europe, it appeared that the methodology and the approach for developing the model could be quite different, for instance the French6 and the Dutch models...The Section for Professionals Associations (SPA) of ICA published in 2007 a paper summarising information on archival and recordkeeping competency, certification and accreditation programs in various countries throughout the world.7 This paper can be considered as a first step from SPA to have a basis for reflection comprising several case studies. However we can be surprised by the reduced number of initiatives throughout the world. They all were developed by professional associations. There might exist "official" models at the national level developed by public institutions, but in most of the European countries, this is not obviously the case. The 2007 International Conference of the Round Table on Archives in Québec City gave us the opportunity to confirm concretely this impression. I proposed to set up a discussion group (this was a new format for the conference, tested in 2006). The topic was "Why do you feel special as an archivist?", or "What makes our profession specific?". The group gathered eighteen people from different countries, traditions, and working environments. I regret to say that we were not able to agree about a single core competency after a two hours discussion. One of the main points was that records managers participating in the discussion group did not want to be considered as archivists, and were pretending that it was a different profession, while some of the archivists felt as they could be records managers as well... For others, it was a single profession. This situation could easily be applied to Europe...There would be an important consequence for our project: we would not use in our study or whatever product we would deliver the terms "archivists" or "records managers" in our study, but preferably take into account the concept of whole lifecycle management. Hans was no longer with us. However in Québec a simple, but friendly tribute was paid to him by his "fellows in competencies", and we watched an interesting video showing Hans dancing in an hotel room in Curacao, with a group of colleagues I will not mention here. Dancing again... Act three: How Hans went on inspiring the project and preventing his friends to forget about him (Kuala Lumpur 2008, Girona 2010) As a consequence of this repeated finding, the working group decided, in the framework of the International conference of professional associations held in Madrid (October 2007), to give priority to the methodological aspect and not to a precise definition of content. The project would therefore consist not PROFESSIONAL 6 The French model is available online at http://www.archivistes.org/IMG/pdf/Referentiel_metiers.pdf 7 Sources relating to archival and recordkeeping competency and certification and accreditation programs, 2007, available at www.ica.org. Since the publication other competency models have been developed, including the French one. 106

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Jaarboeken Stichting Archiefpublicaties | 2010 | | pagina 108