An interesting off list message from a List subscriber stated well what
I was aiming at earlier.  Records managers respond to the best interests
of their employers.  Exactly.  These may vary widely.  For some of you,
the American taxpayer is a beneficiary client.  For others, there may be
a more narrow focus.  And what works for some of you may be disastrous
for others.

The types of debates we're having here are useful because you never
know if you are going to move from one environment to another.  Even if
something does not affect you now, it might in the future.

Any one of you potentially could move from the private to the public
sector.  Or you could move to a private sector organization that gets a
new chief executive who loves history and asks a lot of questions about
his company and its present and past activities.  S/he may want to know
why past internal reorganizations succeeded or failed.  Or why the
introduction of certain business processes were met well by employees
while others were not.   Well, that calls for the ability to research
internal history, and maybe even annotations and deliberative
information.  Not all historians write for the public and you might find
yourself working with an organizational historian whose work product
never is seen by the public but is useful to your employer.

I for one have found my NARA background useful in my current job as
historian.  I even did a rotational assignment as an appraisal archivist
when I worked at NARA.  I went out to agencies, helped appraise their
records, etc.  To this day, I keep in mind some of what I learned then!

As for Steve, who really hates paper, well, if there is a power outage
or blackout in Washington, I know I can get a flashlight and still read
my paper files.  Work and research don't have to stop (hmmmm).  And I
even have a manual typewriter which I have kept for the artifactual
value, LOL!  Of course, I also have my personal Treo smartphone, yuppie
that I am.  ;-)  So, I've got the whole spectrum covered.

Maarja

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