Society Of American Archivists Research Articles

Marketing the Archivist

SUMMARY The Society of American Archivists hosted its remarkable Task Force on Archives and Society during David B. Gracy II's 1983-1984 presidency. Charging itself to confirm the importance of the archivist to society, raise public awareness of archives, and improve the archival image, the task force fostered an era of substantial productivity in outreach, one of the tenets of the archival profession. The results of the primary accomplishment, nicknamed “The Levy Report,” a project divided into a Study Track and an Action Track, surprised the membership-at-large but became a tour de force within the profession. The Task Force on Archives and Society accomplished its goals. Articles published in the past twenty years attest to its influence on the history of the archival enterprise.

Graduate archival education at Western Washington University

As the archival profession seeks a wider role in the field of information science, the need to prepare students for careers in a rapidly changing world requires multidisciplinary education, greater emphasis on core archival knowledge, and fully articulated graduate programs combining structured course sequences with practical experience and sophisticated research projects. The Society of American Archivists is currently considering new “Guidelines for a graduate program in archival studies”. This case study of the graduate program in archives and records management at Western Washington University provides one example of the diverse offerings available for archival students. The six key aspects of the Western Washington University curriculum include: linking history and archives, integrating archives and records management, emphasizing information technology, incorporating management principles, including practical experience, and requiring research for a master’s thesis.

Ten Challenges for the Archival Profession

The archival profession faces daunting challenges at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Ten of the most pressing challenges facing archivists are identified and described. They include: managing electronic documents, devoting more resources to non-textual materials, recognizing that records are global, devising new methods for description and access, expanding access and collection development priorities, generating more research on the archival aspects of information management, strengthening the Society of American Archivists, expanding the resources of the archival enterprise, and maintaining the profession's role as trusted guarantors of society's interests.

The Society of American Archivists and Graduate Archival Education: A Sneak Preview of Future Directions

The Society of American Archivists' approach to graduate archival education has changed in recent years. Guidelines for education have evolved to the point where the 1994 guidelines endorse master's programs in archival education. The SAA Strategic Plan offers strong support for graduate archival education and research, including archival education at the doctoral level. The 1994 guidelines will now be revised in light of the changes in graduate programs and archival work since they were written.

The SAA as Sisyphus: Education Since the 1960s

Approximately thirty years ago, the Society of American Archivists (SAA) embarked on an effort to standardize and possibly accredit archival education at the graduate level. American archivists and manuscripts curators have traditionally had extensive graduate training in history. In terms of what archival education should be, however, there was simply no consensus on basic matters. Moreover, such consensus was essential to any national education program. Miller's paper examined the various options through 1983 and concluded that in the end, the Society lacked both the will and the resources to accredit graduate programs. Using Camus's Myth of Sisyphus as a metaphor for the Society of American Archivists' efforts to standardize the educational process, Miller suggested that the Society examine alternative means of formalizing graduate-level education. While not suggesting any particular changes, Miller urged the Society to consider the existence of other possibilities.

The Society of American Archivists and Graduate Education: Meeting at the Crossroads

The author argues that something unanticipated has occurred, graduate archival education has expanded and matured and graduate educators have assumed leadership in the continued development of this aspect of the profession. These developments create new tensions about where graduate education is heading and the role of professional associations such as the Society of American Archivists. The author considers options for how educators ought to work on nurturing graduate archival education, believing that no matter what options are selected, the future of graduate archival education rests primarily with what graduate educators deem it to be.

Meeting the Challenge of Contemporary Records: Does It Require a Role Change for the Archivist?

Recent archival literature reflects a number of diverse definitions of the role of the archivist. Many older assessments stress a more cohesive definition: the need for archivists to be all to all archives, equally representing users and administrators, creators and researchers. The challenge created by contemporary records is not to change this fundamental role, first expressed over two hundred years ago during the French Revolution, but to create new ways to fulfill it. The task requires making three crucial distinctions: between the archivist's methods and the archival mission, between the archivist's work and archival functions, and between professional issues and archival science issues. Only by learning how to strike a balance between the needs of archivists as individuals and the collective identity of the archival profession can the challenges of contemporary records be met. An earlier version of this article was delivered on August 26, 1999, as the author's presidential address at the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Encoded Archival Description

Encoded Archival Description (EAD) is an emerging standard used internationally in an increasing number of archives and manuscripts libraries to encode data describing corporate records and personal papers. The individual descriptions are variously called finding aids, guides, handlists, or catalogues. While archival description shares many objectives with bibliographic description, it differs from it in several essential ways. From its inception, EAD was based on Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), and, with the release of EAD version 1.0 in 1998, it is also compliant with EXtensible Markup Language (XML). EAD was and continues to be developed by the archival community. While development was initiated in the United States, international interest and contribution are increasing. EAD is currently administered and maintained jointly by the Society of American Archivists and the United States Library of Congress. Developers are currently exploring ways to internationalize the administration and maintenance of EAD to reflect and represent the expanding base of users. ESARBICA Journal Vol.20 2001: 71-80

Public Services Education for Archivists

Is the public service ethos of archivists lacking, and what can be done about it in archival education programs? The author examines these questions in the light of the education guidelines issued by professional associations in the United States and Canada. He discusses the place of public services education in the larger context of professional formation of archivists, and in particular in relation to the principles guiding archivists in their service to the public. He then sketches the scope of public services, and analyzes the objectives, content, and methodologies of a course on the subject. In a final section, he looks at the question of students' conduct of research on the subject. He argues that supposed weaknesses of the archival service ethic can best be overcome and the peculiar difficulties archivists face in rendering reference and public services can best be addressed in a single course in the context of a program of study such as is called for by the Society of American Archivists and the Association of Canadian Archivists.

Seeing the Past as a Guidepost to Our Future

The author reflects on the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the Society of American Archivists by looking at its evolution, noting things which have changed for the better within SAA, and some things which have not. Forging a national identity and membership was not a steady, nor always consensual, process, but as an organization, the SAA reached a degree of maturity in the 1970s, only to be challenged by new developments in the 1980s and 1990s such as electronic records, certification and graduate education guidelines, and growing membership diversity which lead to the development of new sections and roundtables to serve new and varied interests. Challenges continue to lie ahead for the Society. However, if its fundamental components are sound, SAA should have the flexibility and determination to meet these challenges.

BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK REVIEWS

Punch Card Records: Precursors of Electronic Records

Section 2 of the 1939 Federal Records Act defines the meaning of records to preface regulations related to records disposal and explicitly includes punch cards among the record types. The definition of records from the 1939 act and from its subsequent revisions have been used traditionally and statutorily as the definition of records applied to archives. The appearance of punch cards in a list of types of records at such an early point in the history of the U.S. National Archives suggests enlightened consensus on the record nature of this then-new form of documentary material. Punch card records emerged as a by-product of the introduction of information technology in the U.S. federal government in the early twentieth century, yet the U.S. National Archives accessioned only a very few collections of punch card records. The history of punch card records offers perspective on the manner in which records creators and archivists responded to the unprecedented challenge of punch cards as a form of documentary material. A review of this history provides the basis for an interpretation of the archival mission in a technologically based records environment. This paper has its roots in a 29 October 1989 presentation at the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists in St. Louis, Missouri. The author wishes to thank and acknowledge a number of colleagues who have assisted her. Meyer H. Fishbein graciously gave permission for the use of his personal papers; Charles M. Dollar suggested some material; and Thomas E. Brown and Kenneth Thibodeau offered recommendations, interest, and encouragement. In addition, archivists Patricia Andrews, Jennifer Davis Heaps, Frank Heppner, and Aloha South helped by locating textual materials in the records of the National Archives, while Barbara Burger, Theodore Hull, and Michael Meier assisted with the illustrations. Linda Henry suggested a number of very useful editorial changes. The author is nevertheless solely responsible for the interpretations made herein.

Society of American Archivists

Society of American Archivists

Viewing the Field: A Literature Review and Survey of the Use of U.S. MARC AMC in U.S. Academic Archives

U.S. MARC AMC (MAchine-Readable Cataloging for Archives and Manuscript Control) has "come of age," taking its place in the mainstream of both archival and cataloging thinking, theory, and practice. The meteoric rise in the use of MARC AMC is evident in the statistics reported by the bibliographic utilities. The literature of MARC AMC, although extensive, has not been reviewed since 1989 and does not systematically document the use of the format in U.S. academic archives. This paper presents a review of that literature and reports the results of a 1992 survey of 200 archivists, representing 200 academic archives in the United States. These respondents were randomly selected from the Society of American Archivists' 1991 Directory of Individual Members; they cooperated in a survey examining the use of MARC AMC for cataloging archival and manuscript collections. This paper profiles the institutional use of MARC AMC, including the choice of a cataloging standard, such as Steven Henson's Archives, Personal Papers and Manuscripts, Second Edition (APPM, Second Edition) and Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, Second Edition, Revised (AACR2R), chapter 4. The paper concludes with an admonition for archivists and traditional catalogers to work collaboratively to catalog archival and manuscript collections.

The Development of Professional Education for Librarians and Archivists in the United States: A Comparative Essay

The author compares the historical development of professional education for librarians and for archivists in the United States. While librarians have developed a formal graduate education program for preparing practitioners for entry into the profession, archivists in the United States are only now beginning to develop such a program. The author identifies the funding provided by the Carnegie Corporation and the leadership provided by the American Library Association as the critical elements in the successful development of professional education programs for librarians, and he contrasts this situation with the lack of leadership provided by the Society of American Archivists in developing archival education. The article concludes with a discussion of some possible future directions for archival education.

The Epic Struggle: Subject Retrieval from Large Bibliographic Databases

Archivists have talked at length about the virtue of contributing records to a national bibliographic utility to provide enhanced access to collections. There has been little discussion, however, of the difficulties of finding materials in such large database environments. This article discusses a retrieval study that focused on collection-level archival records in the OCLC Online Union Catalog, made accessible through the EPIC search system. Data were also collected from the local OPAC at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) in which UNC-CH-produced OCLC records are loaded. The chief objective was to explore the retrieval environments in which a random sample of USMARC AMC records produced at UNC-Chapel Hill were found—specifically, to obtain a picture of the density of these databases in regard to each subject heading applied and, more generally, for each record. Key questions were (1) how many records would be retrieved for each subject heading attached to each of the records and (2) what was the nature of these subject headings vis-à-vis the number of hits associated with them. Findings show that large retrieval sets are a potential problem with national bibliographic utilities and that the local and national retrieval environments can vary greatly. The need for specificity in indexing is emphasized. This article is based on a paper given at the Society of American Archivists' 1992 annual meeting in Montreal. OCLC supported this research. The author wishes to thank Patricia Haberkern, who did much of the searching.

Introduction to 2020 Vision

About the author: Margaret Hedstrom is chief public records analyst at the New York State Archives and Records Administration and director of its Center for Electronic Records. She was chair of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) Committee on Automated Records and Techniques (1988-90) and wrote the SAA manual on machine-readable records (1984). She is a fellow of the SAA and currently serves on Council.

Some Concluding Thoughts

About the author: Hugh Taylor was respectively archivist of the cities of Leeds and Liverpool and the County of Northumberland in England before emigrating with his family to Canada in 1965. Since then, he has been, in turn, provincial archivist of Alberta, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, with some years as director of the Archives Branch of what is now the National Archives of Canada. A Fellow and former president of the Society of American Archivists, he now practices as a consulting archivist and lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

Shaping the Future: SAA Leadership in a Changing World

This past year has offered the Society of American Archivists (SAA) unprecedented opportunities to begin to change public perception about archivists' proper place and the value of records. The challenge for the next few years will be to capitalize on these opportunities to build a sustained leadership effort. SAA's recently adopted strategic plan calls on the Society to exert leadership on significant archival issues by shaping policies and standards, building effective coalitions, and improving public awareness of the value of archives. The author discusses some issues that the Society should address as it moves to implement this goal.

Society of American archivists

Society of American archivists