Amen to everything you say, Stephen, but medical scholarly journals 
are specialistic and indeed general doctors get to study as surgeons 
before practicing any surgery, and till such time when they get that 
formal title, cannot practice.  I wish it were the same for RM.

I found very interesting that nobody raised the conceptual reason why 
there would be no justification for RM scholarly journals, that 
records management is a branch of archival science and the RM 
scholarly work is published in archival peer-refereed journals...It 
seems to me that the reason is that very few RM even think of reading 
archival journals as source of information about RM.  Obviously the 
concept has not reached them.

Regardless,  as with medical journals, there is some need for 
specialization here, to deal with issues in some depth, and 
considering that there is a RM "professional" association, there is 
no reason why there should not be a RM "professional" peer-refereed 
journal, other then, as I hear it, people are too busy, do not want 
to spend more money, do not want to be bothered for theoretical 
discussions, etc.  There is no objection in principle other than, 
indirectly, Stephen's, which I much respect.

Luciana

At 07:53 AM 04/12/2009, you wrote:
>I'm not sure how what I'm about to write will be received, but as the
>archivist and UT professor (and my college advisor)  David B Gracy says,
>"And now...into the breach!"
>
>Titles and job designations cause much trouble. People get hung up on the
>title, and I'm no exception - but my wife is. She dislikes titles and
>rarely ever passes out business card for she does not want to be
>classified at this or that. But I digress. back in the day, back when FDR
>was president, the archivist cared for all records, and not just archival
>records. The archivist was in today's terms the archivist and the records
>manager. Thanks to the New Deal and WWII, production of records increased
>exponentially and beyond what the then National Archives could handle.
>Thanks to Wayne Grover and a handful of other archivists at the Nat'l
>Archives, they developed what came to be records management...a solution
>for archivists to be able to manage large volumes of records responsibly.
>And then cam the split in the profession where archivists dealt primarily
>with permanent/historical records, and records managers dealt with
>everything else. Outside of USA, UK and Australia, the title of records
>manager is virtually unknown...they're all archivists and they do the job
>of both archivists and records managers.
>
>Having said that, I would like to see a reconciliation between the two
>halves of the profession, though realistically I don't think it will ever
>happen. In my own small way, I consider myself both archivist and records
>manager, but if I had to pick one title to describe what I do, I would
>prefer archivist as defined/used from the beginning of recorded time up
>until the post WWII split. It seems a little academic to split the
>profession in two. It would be like my wife's surgeon saying "I'm not a
>doctor, I'm a surgeon." The split has certainly hurt both archivists and
>records managers. Our thread is proof of that. And I've seen the same
>types of  threads and chipped shoulders when I subscribed to the
>archivists' listserv and when I worked among the archivists and librarians
>at Yale. Reverting back to my wife and her infinite wisdom, it's not the
>title that makes you, it's the quality of your work and how you interact
>with those around you.
>
>I'll step off my soapbox now.
>
>
>Stephen Cohen, Records Manager
>MetLife \ Legal Affairs
>1095 Avenue of the Americas
>New York, NY  10036-6796
>212-578-2373
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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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