IT Professionals and Archivists Need Common Studies in Digital Archiving

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce two new educational programs Mikkeli University of Applied Sciences (MUAS) started in 2005-2008. The target for both programs is to give knowledge and skills on one hand in the Records Management and Digital Archiving and other hand in the Information Technology. Digital contents, electronic records management and digital archiving have been a revolution in RM and archiving since 90's and it has been clear that skills and methods from the paper world will not be enough for the archivist and records manager of today.To get an understanding in our development there is a need to make introduction to the Finnish educational system, a special view concerning our education of RM and archiving and our background as R&D organization in the Mikkeli district.The records management education has not been very covering in the higher education institutes in Finland, actually the first assistant professor chair and courses for records management were started in the University of Tampere in the late 1990's as an addition to the educational programs for librarians and information specialists. Traditionally the National Archives Service has trained their own staff: young historians have been employed as trainees and trained internally. Other public sector operations, like 400 municipalities - cities, towns and rural districts - have got their archivists with practices of similar kind. In the recent years there have been some new master programs in other science universities, but they have been based more on history than information science. MUAS programme is still the only one based on Information Technology