After wading through all of the posts on this topic, I find it very
interesting that those who are the most ardent supporters of the value or
need for such a publication are mostly among the academic community, not the
daily practitioners in the profession.  

And who are thought of as the primary reviewers of such publications?  These
same academics... many of whom have a great depth of understanding theory,
but little practical experience in the Records Management trenches building
programs from the ground up, adjusting practices to meet the needs of
organizations on a daily basis, and having to ensure that efforts satisfy
requirements, not theories.  These RM Practitioners are the ones called upon
to ensure that programs are efficient and effectively run, in practice NOT
theory.

I admit I do enjoy reading theories about the practice of Records
Management, but as others have said, I'd much prefer to read potential
solutions that have been well thought out to resolve known concerns, and
guidance which has been prepared to explain practice from a practical rather
than theoretical viewpoint for those entering the field who have real issues
to deal with.  Standards, Guidelines, Technical Reports, all based in fact
and supported by examples.

When you look at the NHPRC Grants that are regularly awarded on an annual
basis, the great majority of them are to deal with issues facing
organizations that are basis- preservation, long term access, conversion of
content to a neutral format, reconstruction of a historical collection. 
They aren't looking for theories on how to accomplish these things, and they
aren't looking for scholarly review... they want to hear from practitioners
about how to accomplish this with proven methods in a specified amount of time.

Over the past few years, I have found myself more regularly screaming at the
pages of a known publication on RM because of the lack of information to
support the quasi-theoretical manner in which many topics are being
presented, or the never ending lists of citations of age-old publications or
scholarly articles with no basis in practice. What ever happened to the good
old articles that gave multiple examples of where the content presented had
been applied successfully? 

I must also agree wholeheartedly that the concept of ARMA, the AIEF, or the
ICRM being the sources that "must do this" is wrong... and while there will
likely be discussion of this in the next member survey, I'd certainly hope
that those responding take the time to learn more about what peer review
really is and get an understanding of what they may be asking for.  As I've
said before, I don't consider Wikipedia to be a great source for a lot of
topics, but they REALLY understand this one! http://bit.ly/5RjeJo

As for the whole concept of "theory versus practice", don't take my word for
it... you can read what many scholars and others have had to say.

Larry
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Harold S. Geneen
"You cannot run a business, or anything else, on a theory. "

Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut and/or Yogi Berra
"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice
there is. "

Anthony Trollope
"Life is so unlike theory. "

Voltaire
"Let us work without theorizing, 'Tis the only way to make life endurable. "

Thomas A. Edison
"I never once made a discovery ... I speak without exaggeration that I have
constructed three thousand different theories in connection with the
electric light ... Yet in only two cases did my experiments prove the truth
of my theory. "

Ed Howe
"A theory is no more like a fact than a photograph is like a person. "

Thomas Huxley
"Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed
by an ugly fact. "

Warren Buffett
"Well, it may be all right in practice, but it will never work in theory."

John Cash
"I want to move to theory. Everything works in theory." 

Immanuel Kant
"Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere
intellectual play "

Friedrich Engels
An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory. 

Samuel Smiles
"Practical wisdom is only to be learned in the school of experience.
Precepts and instruction are useful so far as they go, but, without the
discipline of real life, they remain of the nature of theory only. "

Niels Bohr
"We are all agreed that theory is crazy. The question which divides us is
whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling
is that it is not crazy enough. "

H.L. Mencken
"A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas. "

Richard P. Feynman
"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart
you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong. "

Karl Popper
"Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a
sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it
was intended to solve. "

Manfred Eigen
"A theory has only the alternative of being right or wrong. A model has a
third possibility: it may be right, but irrelevant. "

David Antin
"I'm not sure what theory is, unless it's the pursuit of fundamental
questions. "

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