Roles for the academic base of the profession

Teaching on what became the Master of Archive Administration degree course, over 28 years, has been more directly revealing of change than any other aspect of my professional work. In the early days the atmosphere was in many ways similar to what I had experienced at Bodley. My task was to represent what the historians termed 'practical' issues and subjects, and do my best to make sure that these had due weight on the course provided. This involved some in-fighting in meetings, but also a long dialogue with the main representative of traditional academic values, Dr Dorothea Oschinsky. I remember Dorothea with affection, and would like to say that our dialogue was rarely oppositional. She was open to new ideas, and in fact had a kind of fatalistic appreciation that her own disciplines would relatively decline. Her own historical work, indeed, was not entirely traditional. She will be remembered not only as the editor of a difficult medieval treatise, but also as an economic historian interested in the technicalities of accounting. The introduction of technical and business archives was therefore not an issue; and opposition to the teaching of management came from other quarters. Records management was a strong component of the course even in 1969, which shows that there was an immediate response to the Cambridge seminar of the year before. We began to include a short course on computing for archives in 1970.

Throughout the period 1968-1995 profound changes occurred in the weighting and character of the archives training course, but all these changes were gradual and were the result of ongoing debates within the profession, and our response to what we perceived as market pressures. Despite a requirement for some knowledge of Latin, still maintained (for the present, at least), the pressure of applications never ceased, so that we may claim, perhaps, that our main clients were satisfied with the general character of the curriculum. When the Society of Archivists began to recognise and formally visit the training courses, the dialogue between academics and professionals became more formalised, but this event did not in fact do much, directly, to alter the curriculum. The Society's visitors were articulating needs that we had ourselves largely recognised, and the kind of changes they asked for were those that we had been accustomed to develop ourselves. Pressures from the profession at large have therefore been to adapt and fine-tune, rather than to restructure - though we should remember that the overall effect, over time, has been quite radical.

The really radical changes have begun to occur in 1996 and will continue for the next few years, both at Liverpool and elsewhere. They stem from changes of government policy, university funding, the development of alternative methods of training, and from the impact of ideas and practices coming from other disciplines. Changes in the university courses also, of course, parallel changes in the organisation of the profession itself, and especially as far as this is manifested in the structure and role of the Society of Archivists.

Curiously, the advent of computing as a universal tool has not itself been very radical in its effect. At one time it appeared likely that computing for archives would become a distinct speciality in the profession, and a strongly-developing new curriculum element in the training courses. In 1988 I argued that it might replace the traditional palaeography as an infrastructural discipline for some archivists, since like the earlier studies, we would be obliged universally to use it, and it could supply many of the same techniques and qualities - exactness, ability to interpret texts, the production of reasoned means of access to documents. I was also one of those who, through most of the 1980s, thought that IT might be one of the factors unifying the information professions: the 'harmonisation' debate.

Both of these perceptions have proved to be wrong. There has been little perceptible harmonisation, even in small or developing countries, and currently there seems no debate on it, even in countries where archivists and librarians are trained alongside each other. The earlier view of the status of computing for archives is apparently just as dead. The student intake of 1996 is the first that has come through school and first degree experience with a ready command of computing techniques. This has made it obvious that teachers on archival courses do not have to train students in IT, which therefore ceases to be a distinct element in the course, and instead have the task of showing how the new technology might be used to support professional processes.

In one swift blow this development has halted what had been a curriculum element of growing importance, and replaced it with a field in which much of the research has still to be done. Although this development has certainly appeared at first as a setback, it is in fact a significant step forward, it has presented the academic centres with a viable field for their research and development work, and has greatly facilitated more traditional course elements (such as archive or records management) by providing effective tools ready to hand. Looking back, I now deeply regret having been one of those who tried, too early as we can now see, to train colleagues in primitive and undeveloped IT.

On the other hand, the coming of automation in general administration has presented us with the biggest and most urgent field of research since the rediscovery of the riches of our medieval archives in the late nineteenth century. Although much research work done in the richer countries has laid down a good base of theory, the practice of electronic records and archives management has all still to be done. Here is a major element in the research and development agenda for the next few years.

The enormous shake-up of higher education that started in 1992 and has not yet been fully worked through has by 1996 shown clearly that for the immediate future we shall not be left to develop our own training systems. The intake of students, the length and weighting of their (modularised) courses, the fees payable, and the allocation of scholarships or bursaries, are all undergoing change impelled from government agencies, or from Brussels. The actual subjects taught, of course, are still under the control of the teachers of professional subjects, aided by the Society of Archivists, but everything else is externally driven. This is a new experience, and not a cosy one.

In addition, we can now see that the most fundamental change in the atmosphere and character of university courses has been the introduction of an overriding pressure to raise money externally, and to expand numbers (within the same resource constraints) as rapidly as possible. Responding to the same pressures, new courses are appearing in other universities and colleges, and the competition these supply will undoubtedly also affect the older courses, as they will affect the general conditions of entry into the profession. This revolution in higher education is probably going to prove more fundamental than any of the more obvious changes in the conditions of professional work that have occurred in recent years, though it should be seen in conjunction with the great spread of the practice of employing people on short-term contracts.

(Cook M. Changing Times, Changing Aims)