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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