Thoughts on a State Records Program

Abstract

Archives! Who needs them?! This comment was attributed to a consultant working under direction of a team of businessmen charged with recommending efficiencies and economies in operations of a state government in New England. team recommended abolishing state archives and records management program as a marginal luxury of state government.1 Officials in that state disregarded this recommendation, but attitude that government records programs are a marginal luxury still exists among some governmental decision makers and many members of public. It reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of role of government records in society. It also reveals a shortcoming of government archivists who fail to articulate role of government records and need for an active state records program. That state archives and records management programs are under-supported, not fully utilized, and misunderstood documented by Edwin C. Bridges in his analysis of reports on state archives programs from initial round of NHPRC-funded state historical records assessment and reporting projects.2 Analysis of reports from second round of these projects does nothing to refute his conclusion that American state archives are in an impoverished condition and are currently unable to provide adequate care for their records.3 The image of state records administrators that emerges from these reports, writes Bridges, is of a small, haggard band of defenders surrounded by forces that threaten to overwhelm them and desperately struggling just to survive.4 His use of cliche, the cycle of poverty, aptly describes conditions in many state programs. If this situation, then why have a state records program anyway? Is it a marginal luxury? In times of fiscal constraint, can a state afford to support its state archives program? What role of records in state government? answer to this last question key to answering others. It to this question that archivists must thoughtfully respond so that government decision makers, citizens who elect them, and bureaucracy that serves them, can vividly understand reasons to support a state archives and records management program. Government one institution that in one way or another, at one time or another, touches lives of every single individual within its jurisdiction. It not only affects lives of all citizens, but inherent in that contact between government and citizen a complex interdependence of rights and obligations, of mutual responsibility and accountability.5