Actually it was the media types, not the IT people, I accused of being
semi-literate, and I really don't think there's anything snobby about
expecting excellence from someone in their chosen field. Neither do I expect
to hear of IT team in cattle prod horror in the near future....
Quite seriously, I keep sane in this job by indulging a heavy streak of
irony, and I'm sorry if anyone thinks I mean that sort of flippant remark
seriously. We spend a lot of time insulting the IT people here as they spend
time insulting us, and having worked off our superficial frustrations we
then work well together. I worry more about groups of people who are
scrupulously polite to one another; that sort of attitude usually masks
deeply felt hostility.
Neither do I think the situation is disturbingly challenging; I think we've
all got a lot of hard work ahead of us, and I can foresee funding issues
compromising some of our solutions, but one thing the Government's e-govt
initiatives have done is to lay down skills and requirements in a way that
largely defines demarcation between information professionals and
information technology professionals (together with the need for
cross-disciplinary working), and to start putting together the sort of
migration and interoperability standards I doubt we'd ever have achieved
left to ourselves. My experience has been that as a result archive
professionalism has been taken more seriously in local authority circles in
the past couple of years than ever before as our place in the general scheme
of things has been recognised, and issues such as website preservation have
been taken seriously precisely because they can be seen to relate to global
information management issues. I certainly feel I can see the way forward
better than I could at the end of the 1990s, even if I do worry about the
ability of our resources to carry us along it.
Carl Boardman
Oxfordshire Record Office
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