Training for first entry

When we survey the world we tend to look out from the battlements of our own castle. This makes it difficult to give objective and comprehensive views on common enterprises and common aims. However, I doubt whether any would dispute that there have been important changes in what archivists have set themselves to do over the period of my professional experience, 42 years. There would also be substantial agreement about what most of those changes have been. But, seen from my particular turrets, some of these changes are not quite what they might seem, and it may be worth while undertaking a rapid survey to see how it looks from here.

What follows is an entirely personal commentary on some of the changes that have occurred and are occurring in our professional life. I take responsibility for it, and would add that it seeks to attack nobody, nor yet to set up schemes that might be imposed on anybody.

I first decided to have a go at being an archivist in September 1954. I had taken my degree, in History, in June, and spent the summer wandering about confusedly. As autumn began, someone told me of the Bodleian training course, and I went to see them. They had received no applications at all for that year, so I was accepted on the spot, and was the only student for that session, 1954/55.

This experience brings up at once the question of the selection of students on the archive courses today. Since the early 1970s, the archive training courses have, nominally at least, collaborated in a joint applications system. There have always been too many candidates for the places available, and consequently the system of joint application forms has never really worked as it should. If one or two of the courses had developed a particular speciality or character at that time, it might have had a chance. Still, the symbols of collaboration are valuable.

Change is certainly taking place now. There are still too many candidates for each training place, despite the rapid expansion of most of the courses. What I deduce from this is that, despite all changes in the conditions of work, this is still a very attractive career in terms of job satisfaction. I am not sure whether there have been changes in our image and status in society, but it is clear that the job remains one that people like to do. Probably this was always so, but for many years I, like many others, always tried to put off intending candidates by emphasising negative aspects, and especially by claiming a high element of boredom. This attitude, I think, no longer prevails. Partly the change has been caused, no doubt, by the need to attract and bring in, rather than to exclude; but partly because more of us have realised how much better off we are, in some ways, than those who follow other professions. This change has been a welcome one.

Archivists have also had a consistently expanding career structure. I joined the Society of Archivists in 1955, and there has been a net increase in membership every year since then. While numbers expanded, there was also an expansion in the fields of activity; so that where the overwhelming majority had been people working in local authority record offices, there is now almost a preponderance of posts in other sectors. The relative decline in standing of the main local authorities is of course a striking characteristic of the post-Thatcher years. The acceptance of the ideas behind both archives and records management by sections (at least) of industry and business, and by the scientific community, has been as striking.

So despite expansion and growth in the numbers accepted, it is difficult to get on the training courses. Practical experience is now demanded, in effect, and there are more opportunities to do it in one way or another. The course selectors, however, still keep as their main criterion for admission, a demonstration that there has been an informed and determined choice. This is probably one reason why archivists remain a fairly cohesive group with better links inside the circle than out.

(Cook M. Changing Times, Changing Aims)