Professional body accreditation

Everyone at the Centre for Archive and Information Studies is delighted to announce that the Council of the Society of Archivists (SoA) today accepted the recommendation of their Accreditation Team at an Extraordinary General Meeting and confirmed the accredditation of all the Masters degrees in Archives, Records Management, Information Rights and Digital Preservation offered by CAIS.

Our Masters degrees were evaluated against the Society of Archivists' criteria for postgraduate degrees in the record keeping disciplines. During their visit to Dundee earlier this year the Accreditation Team were very positive about the courses offered by CAIS saying that the degrees 'meet and exceed' the requirements of the SoA.

Thoughts on the keynote at the Society of Archivists' conference

The general consensus seems to be that the Society of Archivists conference, held last week in Bristol, was a great success. The range of speakers and topics was broad enough to maintain interest but remained focused on the issues of dealing with digital media. Randall Jimerson’s keynote on archives and justice provided an excellent framework for later discussion. He emphasised that archivists cannot be impartial, that archives are for accountability, open government, diversity and identity, as well as for justice. Given this, and the potential power that this implies that archives hold and, by association, archivists wield, recordkeepers should not be impartial. They should try to be objective while recognising their own biases and seek to promote social justice even if this means partiality. They should break from the traditional view of archivists as passive custodians and be prepared to stand up and use the power of archives.

However Jimerson emphasised that ultimately our decisions are our own and our personal codes of ethics and sense of justice should be the final basis on which we make our decisions. This raises interesting questions as to the nature of justice – one person’s idea of ‘right’ may be very different to another’s – and the role of a professional code of ethics in relation to a private sense of right and wrong.

SAA vs. SOA Conference

When I submitted my grant application, I argued strongly that international cooperation would be necessary if archivists would find practical ways to work with electronic materials.  Last week, I had the pleasure of attending my first Society of Archivists Conference, and I certainly learned a great deal about e-records work in the UK and Europe.  (I'll be posting throughout this week at my blog concerning the sessions I attended.)

While I certainly learned a lot about the varied and productive approaches that UK archivists are taking to e-records, I also learned much more than I expected about the differences in how the 'archives sector' (as they would call it here) is organized in the US vs. the UK.

At the most basic level, I was surprised that the SOA conference was significantly more intimate (one is tempted to say civilized) than a typical SAA meeting, with all that those words imply.   

This might not seem surprising, since SOA attendance is much smaller than SAA , since the conference sessions do not begin until 9 am, since they do not spill over into weekends, and since  all meals, breaks and social events, as well as lodging, were included for one fixed price. In any case, I found that the all inclusive nature of the conference made it easy to meet and chat with people in the fairly relaxed settings, and I have more contacts to follow up on than at the typical SAA meeting where I seem to be constantly looking for someone amongst the crowd.   On the other hand, there is a lot less diversity to the sessions--although this may be due to the fact the theme was 'digital futures'.

I have to say I was very impressed by the presentations I heard; the conference was well organized around this theme, and the talks displayed a good balance between research and practice, with both informing each other.   For the most part, people debated issues honestly while not pulling punches.   I saw researchers and practitioners debating issues directly and effectively, particularly in the panel discussion on archival education and training and in the e-records sessions I attended.

I was also interested to note that numerous representatives of the National Archives, both of England/Wales and Scotland, were attending and speaking.  The National Archives in Kew plays a much stronger leadership/coordination role than NARA does in  the United States.  Under its relatively new executive director, TNA is developing a strategy document called "Archives for the 21st Century." 

This is certainly not news to UK readers of this blog, but the document will shape government policy toward archives services not only at the national level but within local government and other institutions.   One can debate whether on not the policy is wise and well argued, and clearly many people have commented on it, but the most salient point for me (as an American observer), is that such an attempt to coordinate policy is even taking place.  Admittedly, the NHPRC serves a bit of this role in the US by funding records management and archives projects that affect archival workout side of NARA, but even if the PAHR bill becomes law, the US government will have a much more limited role in affecting records issues at a local level than will government here.  NHPRC and other federal agencies have softer and indirect impact, since their role is mainly defined as funding research and projects, not setting policy for local archives.  

The ways of organizing the archive sector in each country reflect the different ways that the US and UK organize socieites and conceive the proper role of government and I'm sure each has its benefits and drawbacks.  I'll leave it for others to debate theological questions such as 'how big should government be'.  I am just interested to see the practicalities of how policy differences affect archival work on a day to day basis.

Let's not be Luddites

Caroline speaking at the conference of the Society of Archivists highlighting the frustrations we all feel occasionally when dealing with digital technology.

Society of Archivists Conference, 2009

The annual conference of the Society of Archivists (SoA) takes place in Bristol this week and both Pat and Caroline are scheduled to speak.

Pat's paper, Employer v Society: Ethics and morality in the workplace environment, is at 11am on Thursday 3 September and develops ideas first presented at the conference of the Association of Canadian Archivists earlier this year. Caroline gives a paper entitled Let's not be Luddites: Why the digital future is our past and present as part of the conference conclusions at 12pm on Friday 4 September. They are also involved in the FARMER Colloquium on Education and Continuing Professional Development for records professionals at 9am on the 4th.

Chris is attending the conference as a delegate. If you're interested in his research please take the chance to speak to him.

The SoA have made an effort this year to make information about the conference available online. The conference blog is available here and the official conference twitter feed is available here or by following @SoAConference09 from your own twitter account. Pat and Caroline, like many other delegates, will also be using twitter to share their thoughts as the conference progresses via our twitter account, @CAIS_Archives. The agreed hashtag for the conference is '#soa09'. You can use twitter search to look for that, or there's an account that's been set up on twapperkeeper to store all the tweets with that tag. We would like to encourage anyone attending or commenting on the conference to use 'soa09' as a tag for blog posts too so that information about, and responses to, the event can be aggregated later.