projects involving in-depth investigation of a specific issue or problem. Moreover,
it would be a requirement for every faculty member to conduct scholarly research,
and these days granting agencies are more than willing to provide funds for
the participation of graduate students in research, thus, they may work as paid
research assistants on faculty members' research projects.
However, in a Master's level program, the cultivation of research skills must
be balanced by the development of professional knowledge. Accordingly, it is
important to inculcate in students engaged in research a sense of the relevance
of their investigations to their professional lives. This is why the study of research
methods should be a required component of any program of education, as it will
equip students with the knowledge necessary not only to produce new knowledge,
but also to understand and interpret research conducted by others.
Graduate programs are judged to a significant degree by the quality and
quantity of the research produced by faculty and students, thus, expanding the
opportunities for research is vital to their success and growth. Students benefit
enormously from the opportunities research projects provide for acquiring
research skills and contributing to the advancement of disciplinary knowledge.
Once the students graduate and begin their working lives, the knowledge and
experience they have gained through their participation in research translates
into a benefit to the institutions and organizations that employ them.15 This
is especially true at a time when speaking of records professionals may refer to
a variety of functions that sometimes have in common only the name of the
object to which they are applied, yet most educational programs that presently
focus on records, their management and preservation, are formally directed to
"archivists."16
Archival tradition maintains that the archivist's primary duty is to the records
while his/her secondary duty is to the user, on the grounds that only by serving
the records we can serve the users. Several decades ago, Sir Hilary Jenkinson
elaborated on the meaning of "serving the records" by stating that archivists
do so by maintaining intact their fundamental characteristics. Thus, they
protect the naturalness of the records by preserving them in the way they have
accumulated through time in their natural sedimentations as a result of being
instruments and by-products of activity; they protect the interrelatedness of the
records by revealing and freezing their interrelationships within the archival
fonds by means of archival description; they protect the impartiality of the
records, that is their ability to reveal the truth, as a consequence of the fact that
they were not created for the purposes for which they will be used by posterity,
by planning their retention and disposition at the time of their creation; and
they protect their authenticity, that is their identity and their integrity, through a
chain of unbroken legitimate custody.17
PROFESSIONALITEIT
15 Luciana Duranti, "Models", cited, pp. 15-18.
16 One of the few exceptions is the Northumbria University (UK) distance education records management
program. See http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/?view=CourseDetail&code= DTDRCM6 (last accessed on
January 24, 2010).
17 H. Jenkinson, Manual of Archival Administration. London: Percy Lund, Humphries, 1922. The volume
underwent a second edition in 1937, which was republished in 1965 with an introduction and bibliography
by R.H. Ellis. See also L. Duranti, The Concept of Appraisal in Archival Science," The American Archivist 57
(Spring 1994): 328-344; and T. Eastwood, "What is Archival Theory and Why is it Important?" Archivaria
37 (Spring 1994): 122-130.
18 Among the models, the most notable is the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model,
available at http://public.ccsds.org/publications/archive/650x0bl.pdf. The information model
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