Cook and Harris - research skills/issues in archival education

[Aus Archives <PubFold_Aus_Archives@towersoft.com.au>]

Hello fellow list-servers

At this time, I want to comment on just a single strand of this very
interesting debate.

The articles by Cook and Harris are welcome, stimulating and interesting.
The recent reference to an article by Stuart Macintyre (Uni of Melb
Historian) from "in the mailbox" adds to the issue of archivists and our
links to history and research skills (and I am writing very broadly here).

There is a deficiency in our archival education where links with our end
users are not fully developed in the various courses being offered and the
views of Cook and Harris are timely reminders of this. 

I am the first to agree that we need the skills to master the records issues
faced both at the front end (records management, records-as-evidence,
whatever) and the back end (records as archival objects/research material).
How will we ever have archives if we do not ensure that our perspectives are
not built into the systems and processes responsible for creating the raw
material in the first place? However, there is a tendency to let the back
end, end-users of archives, to take a lesser role.

What is needed is not a diminution of our focus on records at the front end
but an expansion of our focus on records at the back end (and the interest
groups that need them).  As a profession, we have repeatedly shown ourselves
to be flexible, innovative, ground breaking, energetic and intelligent; we
are more than capable of reintergrating the research/archival elements into
our professional agenda and discourse.

As both a student of history and an archivist, Macintyre's article
highlighted my personal lack of knowledge of research methodolgy at a
post-graduate level and I will not be alone.  Like Trish O'Kane's earlier
posting in this debate, many of us keep our historical agenda alive in the
face of bureaucratic indifference but we all serve this agenda poorly if we
do not keep up with the research agenda of disciplines using archives
generally.  The problem should at least be remedied in archival education.

Regards

Carl Temple

(views my own, not my employers)




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