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. 198

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Jaarboeken Stichting Archiefpublicaties | 2010 | | pagina 200