This is a point that struck me at the Society of Archivists Conference
this year, actually. Whilst I was sitting watching a stream of speakers
talking about a brave new world of closer links between the disciplines
I was thinking that in my own circumstances (similar to Wigan- a one
person office in Greater Manchester and part of a "heritage services"
setup with museums and libraries) this was rather redundant. I spend a
lot of my time trying to accentuate the difference between the
professions so that this service does not get categorised as merely a
subset of the libraries service- the librarian who deals with older
books. Archive services tend to be smaller and less well funded than
either libraries and museums and there is always a danger of them being
consumed.

This has several knock on effects, one of them indeed being records
management. I have been trying to convince my authority of the
importance of the forthcoming FOI legislation in terms of setting up a
proper RM system, but it does make it hard when you're trying to do this
from the position of being a fairly junior member of staff within the
library service. Greater Manchester, and London, are particularly
vulnerable in this area, as a lot of the archive services are one person
offices run by relatively junior members of staff- I am the only
archivist employed by this fairly large metropolitan borough, and am
thus I suppose technically a Head of Repository, but I don't get much
more than the prospective victim at Wigan. The structure also affects
this, as it seems to me (from a small sample) that those offices which
emerged from corporate or central departments generally pay better than
those in a heritage services set up.

The ethos of cultural services and libraries at the moment is so geared
towards the magic term "access" that other things are being subsumed-
delivery of services electronically, remote user access, best value,
enquiry response targets, visitor number targets mean that I haven't
actually catalogued anything for months. But try telling a heritage
services department that perhaps archive services should have different
criteria applied. If we did have a proper records management program it
would be seen as a curiosity within a library system which deals with
public access, and wouldn't fit in with the action plan/ performance
target/ access  system that we operate by

There are other knock on effects of junior members of the profession
running their own offices which I could mention- eg registration. Why
should I jump through hoops to prove with a portfolio that I've done
something towards helping the office I'm employed in when I've been
running it for the past year? Shouldn't the registration scheme be more
flexible and geared towards the candidate? This is unrelated to the
above but a bit of a bee in my bonnet at the moment.

Sorry to rant

Alan carter,
Archivist,
Tameside Local Studies and Archive Service Unit