Thank you, Patrick.  This is useful and we will keep it into account. 
I will only respond to one point that you make:.

At 07:32 PM 07/12/2009, you wrote:
>  Building a body of knowledge is a good first step to being 
> recognized more broadly as a profession. But doing that building is 
> difficult and often thankless. Yes, much of it could be 
> accomplished through more academic and theoretical articles, as 
> well as more monographs... I find it interesting that for all of 
> this hue and cry for a refereed publication, ARMA continues to have 
> to beg for authors to come forward. Heck, ARMA will even pay 
> authors for their articles!

Much of the knowledge is being built by publicly financed national 
and international research projects, which require the researchers to 
publish the findings in peer-reviewed journals, and by the research 
that PhD students in RM conduct for their own dissertation.  Where 
are the findings of this research--which is mostly applied research 
that would be extremely useful to practitioners--published?  In 
archival or information science scholarly journals and in non North 
American RM journals. The researchers who develop new knowledge (much 
of it practical) would not publish it in a journal that is not 
scientifically recognized, not only because they are required to do 
otherwise, but also because the young ones need to get tenure and 
promotion, and those are given for publications in refereed journals.

Of course ARMA has difficulty in finding authors. Its IMJ is not the 
proper places for publishing research and new knowledge by those who 
are writers by calling and by occupation.  If ARMA had a scholarly 
refereed journal, there would be a line up of authors who would want 
to get published in it.  For myself, four of the articles I submitted 
for publication this year would have gone to ARMA first, because they 
are dead on RM as they are on digital records forensics, e-discovery 
issues, intellectual rights, etc.  The writings of my colleague who 
teaches RM would have gone there as they are on banking records.  The 
articles from the dissertations of those who graduated this year 
would have gone there... It is the primary responsibility of 
researchers, academics, and graduates to write in refereed journals, 
but we do not write just for each other...we write for the 
professionals in the field, so that their job becomes easier and they 
do not have to learn through trial and error.

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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