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 


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