Educating the extreme records
professional1: a proposal
In the winter of 2009, at the University of British Columbia, an international
symposium was held, entitled "Our Identities in a World Gone Digital,"2 the
conclusions of which were that future records professionals need to have an
increasingly specialized knowledge rather than a generalist one, and that, to
compensate for an education that, by creating specialists, would inevitably
sacrifice breadth in favour of depth, they will need to work in teams comprising
a range of professionals having complementary knowledge, such as computer
scientists and engineers, lawyers, historians, librarians, or any other kind of
professional having expertise relevant to the task at issue. These conclusions
beg the questions: What kind of specialized knowledge do records professionals
need? How many different specializations are required to ensure full coverage of
all areas of competence of records professionals? What kind of program should
provide these specializations and how?
If one were to pay close attention to the various professional listservs discussing
contemporary records, and the vast amount of writings disseminated through
on-line newsletters, newspapers, grey literature, research papers, professional
blogs, etc., about digital records issues, one could not help noticing that the
knowledge whose lack is more strongly and often lamented is one of the most
traditional kind, but undoubtedly at a level of specificity and complexity
never seen before. Writers complain about the fact that records creators do
not create records when they should, create bad records when they do, do not
have documentary procedures in place, use record making applications as if
they were recordkeeping systems, do not appraise and dispose of records in
a systematic way or destroy the wrong records, cannot deal with e-discovery,
cannot prove the trustworthiness of the records they are responsible for, make
those records inadmissible in court by changing their organization, are not
accountable, are not reliable, etc. Yet, the records creators to whom these writers
refer have in their organizations so-called 'records and information managers'
with experience, and often formal education of some kind, looking after their
records. One could easily state that these professionals need a good injection of
diplomatics and archival science concepts, principles and methods. Except that it
is not that simple.
As much as we educators have striven to develop them, diplomatics and archival
LUCIANA DURANTI
1 In the context of this article, the term "records professional" is used to refer to any individual who is qua
lified as opposed to simply responsible for managing records at any stage of their life-cycle and in any
environment, regardless of the actual title of the position held.
2 The symposium was organised by the University of British Columbia Students Chapter of the Association of
Canadian Archivists. On its website one can find the program, the slides presented and a summary of the
conclusions: http://www.slais.ubc.ca/people/students/student-groups/aca/symposium.php (last accessed
on January 17, 2010).
3 See Luciana Duranti, "From Digital Diplomatics To Digital Records Forensics," Archivaria 68 (2009): 39-66.
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