The Modern Archivist: Formally Trained or Serf-Educated?

Abstract

PROFESSIONAL training is much in our minds these days. Every time someone asks us how he can become an archivist and whenever we are engaging new professional staff, we are faced with two questions. What qualifications and training are essential for an archivist? Where and how should that training be secured? And these questions invite two additional queries. To what extent can the required training be secured in a formal way? To what extent must an archivist, in view of the nature of his work, be trained in the school of practical experience ? Lately we have heard a great deal about the desirability of looking to library schools as a source of professional instruction for the archivist. I think the library schools can make a useful contribution, but of necessity that contribution must be limited. To begin with, only a few of the students in a typical library school class will have an academic background that will equip them for work in the archives. Young people who are thinking of becoming librarians are often encouraged to take a variety of courses in their undergraduate years, with little or no specialization. A library welcomes people with a nodding acquaintance with a number of subject fields. The archivist, by contrast, almost invariably requires a sober, solid training in history and is under a great handicap if he has not had it. And there is the further and fundamental point that the primary purpose of a library school is to give professional training to would-be librarians. Its interest in archival matters must in the nature of things be marginal. It has no time available in its curriculum for a full-scale course for archivists. An elective course or two is the most that it can possibly offer. Such courses can be useful. For better or for worse, a great number of libraries are now busy gathering manuscripts; some of them are even acquiring such strictly archival materials as official records of public agencies. I was interested to find that a recent inquiry had shown that in spite of this development relatively few libraries have large manuscript or archival collections; no more than 50 libraries in the United States, we are told, have holdings of them that exceed 25 or 30 cu. ft. But hundreds of institutions have smaller collections, and many of them