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Dear Robert Thank you for that. I was afraid of writing just what you did because I might have been considered too Neanderthal in my outlook. Or I would have been accused of being too RM-orientated (add sniffy comment from county worthies about business archivists). What I would like to know is just how active are the archivists in their heritage departments going to be about grabbing responsiibility for the FOI Act? I get the feeling this will be considered too important for an archivist - someone lost in history, that's all they know about! - and it will be taken over by some other empire builder - like the Legal department, or, since most of the county's written material is on magnetic disks, Management Services (or whatever their latest titles are). Archivists are going to have to be very proactive about this and fix up meetings with Chief Executives. If they feed their thoughts through the Leisure and Heritage Directorates, they will lose the game. In the meantime I hope anybody who applies for the Wigan job points out that they wont accept it unless it is properly graded. Or better still no qualified archivist should apply for it, but every county archivist and the University departments who teach archivists, should tell Wigan how wrong they are. Leonard McDonald 46 Weaver Ave Rainhill PRESCOT, Merseyside Phone: 0151-426 5273 Mobile: 07775 914796 e-mail: [log in to unmask] ----- Original Message ----- From: Robert Chell <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2000 2:31 PM Subject: LEVELLING THE PLAYING FIELD Although this is not a new issue, I would like to return to the thread raised by the recent Wigan advert. Whilst Bruce Jackson was correct in suggesting that the issue regarding the acceptance of the advert for the Wigan job by the Society should not be the subject of open discussion on this list, the comments in Nicholas Webb's email of 16 November are disturbing, and are, I think, rightly the concern of members of the profession in the current cross-domain approach that has come to the forefront of government policy through the establishment of Resource. The levelling of the playing field can go down as well as up. Inexorably since 1974 when it was perhaps the major issue that the Society sought to address in its Recommendations for Local Government Archive Services, the succeeding twenty five years have seen local authority archive services subsumed into non-executive departments: into Education, Libraries, Culture and Heritage, and Leisure and Tourism Directorates and Departments. What concerns me is this coming together of the disciplines in what is now called the "sector" is identifiying ever more closely archives with culture or cultural property, to the exclusion of what should always be the archivist's first task: that of records management, in the true sense of the continuum management of the records. What constitutes a "record" as opposed to any other form of information is what sets us as archivists or records managers apart from the librarian and the curator: We are essentially dealing with primary material that is or was, or is going to be, an integral part of a transaction of business or administration, and is kept because it forms evidence of that transaction. There is a danger that we take the common ground of information (to be selected, preserved and accessed) too far. For the archivist or records manager, what is recorded is far less important than the record of what is transacted, as Sir Hilary Jenkinson, David Bearman or Greg O'Shea will tell you. Records management is receiving little attention from Resource, although one assumes that it will be included in Resource's declared intention of drawing up its own agenda for archives, due early in 2001. From then on (if we are to believe all that Resource tells us about archives), we may well expect progress on the merging of collections within the sector, and cross domain working, as authorities like Wigan seek to rationalise their human resources and form an integrated cultural services team. What appears to be missing is evidence that such integration is good for the archives, for archivists and for records managers. At a time when FOI and the management of electronic records are setting the agenda for the next ten years, it is surprising that such issues will be being addressed from within departments more accustomed to dealing with sports centres, swimming pools and the cultural heritage. I would be grateful to hear from anyone with factual or anecdotal evidence of the positive or negative outcomes of the effects of such structural re-alignments of local government archives/records management services, especially since the latest round of re-organisations (1994 onwards) or in consequence of the re-structuring of local government under the Local Government Act 2000. If there are enough responses I will summarise for the list Robert Chell ____________________________________________________________________ Get your own FREE, personal Netscape WebMail account today at http://home.netscape.com/webmail