a vision of archival education at the millennium

Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE)

A Vision of Archival Education at the MillenniumAuthor(s): Helen R. TibboSource: Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Summer,1997), pp. 221-225Published by: Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40324207 .

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"The Visible College"

A Vision of Archival Education at the Millennium

LING HWEY JENG, EDITOR

Helen R. Tibbo

Column editor's note: This is the third in a series of articles appearing from time to time in this column that address the teaching of particular areas of interest within library and information science (LIS). Archives, as an area of LIS, do not receive enough attention in many LIS programs. This lack of attention in LIS education is partially due to the lack of qualified archival instructors on the regular faculty of many LIS schools, and partially due to the lack of understanding of the nature of archival education itself. Helen Tibbo's active involvement in archives and archival education since her doctoral years makes her unusually qualified to speak about archival education and its future. If you have a particular area of interest in teaching or curriculum development you could share with our readers, I would like to hear from you.

As American higher education races headlong toward the twenty-first century, archival education must find its way between the pull of tradition and the challenges of high technology and the future. This tension is manifest not only in the materials archivists and manuscript curators manage, but also in the education LIS programs provide for the next generation of professionals and in the methods of dispensing that education. Required is a delicate balance of the old and the new; an appreciation for history coupled with advanced information technology skills; campus- bound courses mixed with distance education offerings to bring the best in- struction to students. Today's archivists (used in the broadest sense to also en- compass manuscript curators and related professionals) must have an extensive repertoire of skills and knowledge. They must know how to

appraise documents, sort the complex relationships in fluid organizational structure, and make materials accessi- ble through electronic networks. In- deed, as the profession approaches the new millennium, the archival enter- prise requires highly talented individu- als with a great deal of technical expertise, subject knowledge, and an understanding of how historians, docu- ment creators, and the general public will use materials of enduring value. Sadly, these new professionals will not be paid at a level commensurate with such education and insight. While appropriate compensation is the subject of another essay, it points to the need to make educational programs efficiently focused on the goal of producing archivists. Students will only stay in graduate school a limited number of years for salaries now offered to beginning professionals.

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About the Author

Helen R. Tibbo is Associate Professor and Assistant Dean, School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

For the first six or seven decades of the twentieth century, many of the most influential archivists in the United States were educated as historians, al- though the debate over library education versus historical training extends back at least until the 1930s.1 This back- ground, blended with influences from the library domain, was appropriate and fortuitous as it led to the development of arrangement schemes and finding aids that organize and describe documents and collections in ways that us- ers, especially historians, find useful. It also provided much of today's appraisal theory, which lies at the foundation of all archival work, whether it be with manuscripts from the eighteenth century or electronic records from 1997. The introduction of the computer, pho- tocopier, fax, e-mail, and other information technologies, coupled with new forms of organizational structure and function, demand that archival education programs extend beyond history to embrace the study of information technology, communication theory and practice, and organizational structure. While departments of history remain an integral element in the archivist's schooling, they can no longer provide the complete education for tomorrow's archivists; but neither can schools of library and information science, or any other university department for that matter.

There has been a long and futile debate in the archival literature over which programs - history or library and information science - provide the best

archival education. To this day, most, if not all, archival education in the United States is housed in one of these two academic venues. Alas, the contentious debates within the Society of American Archivists (SAA), the American Library Association, and the Association for Li- brary and Information Science Educa- tion meetings are moot. Efficient, effective, and appropriate archival education must be a cooperative venture among departments and schools on in- dividual campuses and across universities located around the globe. Archival education should be one of the first fields to take advantage of new distance education technologies that can bring the limited number of archival educators to classrooms around the world.

An "ideal" archival education would be highly interdisciplinary, more on the model of many of today's women's studies programs rather than the history or LIS degrees presently offered. Students would take courses from a number of fields along with a required archival core. Academic advisors would be in the home department (or school) of archival studies, but many courses would come from history, LIS, business management, law, and a wide variety of other fields appropriate to each student's educational goals and work-related objectives. Information technology courses will be critical to this mix, and thus archival programs should be taught at universities offering LIS degrees. At the same time, students should take a significant number of graduate history credits, but this is less

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"The Visible College" 223

restrictive as most universities offer graduate history degree programs.

There are many complicating fac- tors in implementing this vision. First, archival programs and degrees need to be established. Many universities are turning in just the opposite direction, cutting programs and degrees and mak- ing it very difficult to establish new ones. Second, whenever cooperation is required among many players, most of which will not directly benefit from taking archival students in their classes except to see class size increase (which frequently is not a benefit), problems are sure to arise. Most academic programs fill classes with their own students and only let in "outsiders" on a space-available basis. Increasingly, there is very little space. Third, these archival programs will be quite small for a number of years - unless they are part of a large home school such as LIS or history - and very small programs have little influence on campuses. Con- sequently, it will be difficult to get support for new faculty or other expenditures. Small programs are generally in a tenuous position on most campuses today. Conversely, if the archival program becomes part of a larger department or school such as LIS, it will be very difficult to maintain the high degree of autonomy recommended in the SAA Master's of Archival Studies (M.A.S.) guidelines. There is a strong need for an articulate faculty member to help his or her colleagues see the impor- tance of archival studies. Still, with so many competing interests in LIS programs at the moment, it will be difficult to increase support for the archival seg- ment if only one full-time faculty member waves this banner.

What does all this mean for archival educators, especially in LIS programs, and for students? Because of the various difficulties inherent in this "vision," both LIS and history degrees will con-

tinue to be important to practicing archivists. It is most reasonable to expect new degrees, such as the M.A.S. that SAA has outlined, to be developed in history and LIS departments, rather than coming from new free-standing programs with new faculty. Given this likelihood, how do the SAA M.A.S. guidelines2 fit into today's LIS programs and the needs of future archivists?

While the M.A.S. degree guidelines are a good start in articulating the knowledge and skills archivists need, and in producing an identifiable degree separate from either history or LIS, they do not include sufficient coursework on information technology. A more basic problem involves the fact that there is no recommended total number of course credits in the M.A.S. guidelines except that schools which adopt this degree should use the same number of credits as their present history M.A. or M.L.S., M.S.I.S., or M.S.L.S. degrees demand. This seems to present an impos- sible scenario. Students cannot gain the required basic knowledge in history, ad- ministration, and information technology, as well as advanced dedicated archival content in the same number of credits as they could for a more tradi- tional degree. Indeed, it is hard to see how any LIS program that is allowing students to graduate with only thirty- six credits today is providing them with a thorough education for any information profession track, and that is before we start to worry about archival content.

Because of this lack of adequate required course work, joint programs, such as those involving history and M.L.I. S. degrees (there could be other combinations as well, including business and M.L.I.S., etc.), are potentially able to provide a better preparation for students than any single degree yet pro- posed. It is almost irrelevant if a school

Summer 1997



224 Journal of Education for Library and Information Science

offers several archival courses, but no one student takes most of them, or if by taking them the student misses other desirable material (especially in information technology). We must produce balanced, honest programs that are lo- gistically feasible for students.

Archival educators need to articulate the full range of courses appropriate and discuss the optimal length of any stand-alone M.A.S. program. At the same time, they need to create a vision for an M.A.S. degree housed in another program, such as LIS, and assess the extent of course work required for mas- tery and integration of the requisite material. Because there are so few full-time graduate archival educators, they also need to look across campus and across the world for potential partners to bring interdisciplinary content to their programs and to spread archival expertise as far as possible. Rather than competing, all archival programs need to start cooperating for the good of the profession.

In summary, certain issues stand out as critical to the development of sound archival education programs. First, programs and degrees must re- quire an appropriate number of credit hours and courses. The current SAA M.A.S. guidelines set forth content areas for course work, but leave all the details to each program. There must be some congruency between the guidelines and the actual courses and the number of courses students will take. Second, while the SAA M.A.S. guidelines are a good start, archival educators must continue to revise them as higher education and the world changes. In the few short years since the adoption of the M.A.S. guidelines, information technology and archivists' involvement with it have dramatically changed. For exam- ple, when they were devised in 1990 the World Wide Web was not generally used by archivists and there was no SGML

Encoded Archival Description docu- ment type definition. In the intervening years many archives have placed all of their finding aids online and, now, on the Web. It is hard to imagine any world- class archival program in a school that does not provide adequate computer laboratory resources or that does not have ample technology coursework for its students. This will be very expensive for programs, such as those in history, that do not already have an extensive information technology infrastructure. In addition to studying information technology, archival programs should take advantage of it to provide coursework to widely distributed students and to spread expertise across programs. Universities are now offering entire courses via the Web, a development that has enormous potential for the archival community. Finally, while archival educators must seek a stronger identity for their programs and degrees, they must also look for ways to cooperate with other units on their campuses and with other institutions. They must produce a flexible curriculum that will maximize what their students learn in as short a time as possible because there is so much to learn, analyze, synthesize, and create. It is indeed an exciting time to be an archival educator, but one that requires a great deal of dedication, per- sistence, and vision.

References and Notes

1. This is undoubtedly too general a state- ment. As Richard Cox has pointed out, despite some early coursework and even multiple-course programs, many archivists received their only training in work- shops, in-service training, on-the-job training, and other continuing education programs. For a more in-depth analysis of these points and a history of archival education, see Cox's essays: "Archival Edu- cation in the United States: Old

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"The Visible College" 225

Concerns, But New Future?" (98-112) and "A Research Agenda for Archival Edu- cation in the United States," (113-63), in American Archival Analysis (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1990). Cox provides an excellent bibliography on archival education.

2. "Guidelines for the Development of a Curriculum for a Masters of Archival Studies Degree," Archival Outlook (Sep- tember 1994): center insert.

Educators and LIS students who would like to write about teaching methodology, abstract articles, or comment on specific teaching methods are invited to send their contributions to Ling Hwey Jeng, Associ- ate Professor, School of Library and Infor- mation Science, University of Kentucky, 502 King Library South, Lexington, KY 40506-0039. Contributions should be 1,000 to 1,500 words.

Summer 1997



a vision of archival education at the millennium

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