Dear Pat, Mike, Jesse, Carol, and all:

I would like to support Pat Frank's call for a peer-reviewed 
scholarly records management journal and I would like to urge ARMA to 
take the initiative.  The need for such a journal can be easy 
established by carrying out a survey of academics in the RM 
field.  There are many scholars of records management who would be 
eager to publish in such a journal, starting with myself.

I disagree that the reason for the absence of a records management 
journal is the lack of records management programs in academia. 
Indeed, the journal Archivaria was created and had acquired a 
reputation as a scholarly journal before any archival program ever 
existed in Canada, and the discussion about the need for graduate 
archival education that occurred in its pages, by getting the 
attention of academia, was one of the reasons why the first 
autonomous graduate archival program was developed in Canada in 
1981.  [Now we teach at least 4 courses focused on RM, in addition to 
archival courses, and are on our way to creating a RM stream.]

Although RM scholars can and do publish in the peer-reviewed journals 
with a complementary focus (mostly archival journals rather than 
information science journal)--like Carol says--a journal that is 
primarily the scholarly expression of the RM field makes its identity 
stronger, supports the intellectual development of its professionals, 
fosters the growth of dedicated graduate programs, and nurtures the 
development of new knowledge by focusing the scholarly debate on RM 
theory and methods, concepts, principles, ethical and legal issues, etc.

In other words, it is not a matter for us academics in RM of finding 
a peer-refereed journal in which to publish (plenty of those...my 
stuff is all over the place and nowhere in particular); it is a 
matter for RM professionals of having a primary point of reference 
for the scholarly debate in their field (one cannot expect every 
professional to have a subscription to 10 journals in the hope of 
finding one relevant article in each issue of each journal, or to 
search catalogues of book titles without having the opportunity of 
reading a review written by a scholar in the RM field); it is a 
matter for the RM discussion of being enhanced by its concentration 
in one forum, and it is a matter for the RM field as a whole of being 
represented to the world of academia and business as a distinctive 
area of intellectual endeavor by a flagship scholarly journal.

Thanks Jesse for raising this issue once more.  I hope ARMA will 
start listening.

Luciana

Dr. Luciana Duranti
Chair and Professor, Archival Studies
Director, The InterPARES Project www.interpares.org
Director, Digital Records Forensics Project www.digitalrecordsforensics.org
School of Library, Archival and Information Studies www.slais.ubc.ca
The University of British Columbia
The Irving K. Barber Learning Centre
Suite 470, 1961 East Mall
Vancouver, British Columbia  V6T 1Z1 CANADA
Tel: 604.822.2587
Fax: 604.822.6006
www.lucianaduranti.ca
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