15

UNIT III

• Read the text.

THE ROLE OF A UNIVERSITY: LIVERPOOL

It is notoriously difficult to re-enter ordinary employment after foreign experience, however educative that may have been. Soon after my return to the UK I was appointed to the post I was to hold for the next 27 years, at the University of Liverpool. I am grateful to the university for having allowed me the space to develop the ideas crudely formulated in my earlier experiences. My post was based in the central administration, reporting to the Registrar, who in those days was a sort of chief executive, but I was contractually bound to join in the teaching needed for what was then the Diploma in Archival Studies. Beyond this, there was no clear brief. I set out to establish what became recognised for a time as a distinct academic unit, with a programme of research, teaching and operational services. There were then no models for such a thing.

The operational services began with records management, and this service has now operated sufficiently long in the university to be regarded as essential. In a period of severe funding cuts and radical restructuring, it remains a lively and viable operation, and indeed it is hard to see how the university could abandon it, even if it wished to. There are serious constraints in developing records management to a proper standard in a university. Chief among these is perhaps the impossibility of identifying relative costs; the expense of the central services is clear enough, but those operated by departments are not. This feature of the university appears to be surviving even the cost controls of the 1990s. Other difficulties are presented by the impossible maze of committees and boards, mostly serviced not by professional administrators but by academics taking it in turn; and by the labyrinthine complexity of the financial controls.

Throughout the 1970s university archivists - a small but growing band - looked for a role in the more general field of archives. The lack of a possible role was to prove the main difficulty at first. There was at that time no observable place for university activity in the area, because of the entrenched position of the local record offices. The problem was tackled by several studies, including one by the British Records Association, but no clear result ensued. In about 1970 the Liverpool Polytechnic (now the John Moores University) mounted a conference aimed at arriving at a national policy on collecting archives, but this collapsed when the British Library announced that it would not co-operate in any such scheme, and the proceedings were never published. The situation in Scotland was quite different. The general absence at that time of local archive services made it possible for large-scale surveys to be mounted from universities, and these have since developed into important central services. For good or ill, Liverpool was prevented from following the path that was taken by Glasgow.

Gradually, however, a role for the university began to emerge. We took a strong part in helping local archive services to develop, and in co-ordinating them when they appeared. This collaboration worked best during the brief period of the Merseyside Metropolitan County, which is when the organisation now known as the Merseyside Archives Liaison Group was set up. We were active participants in the formation of the Specialist Repositories Group, which was a by-product of the Society's annual conference in 1977. It became increasingly clear that the territorial services could not provide for many large and important archives, not based in any particular place. Into this empty space several universities moved during the 1970s and 1980s. Though in a sense this movement has now been ratified and to a degree paid for by the higher education funding agencies, we still lack a national agreement that recognises areas of interest and seeks to provide for those still unsupported.

Liverpool's main field of activity began to be defined during the 1980s. The deposit of the Cunard archives some years before had set out one agenda, involving co-operation with what became the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, but this aspect could not be developed since it was already strongly supported by the local archives services. The deposit of Dr Barnardo's archives set a better path for development. When this was reinforced by the archives of the National Children's Home, the Fairbridge Association and Family Service Units, the university became an important centre for the study of social work with children. The achievement of this aim was tested in the international multi-disciplinary conference held in 1998.

In 1992 the archives unit was, as a result of a general restructuring, removed from the administrative sector and established as a department of the library. This change was ratified in 1995 by joining it to the library's special collections, so forming a much larger department. The new entity was further enlarged by the addition of a number of

contract staff paid for by the Higher Education Funding Council's non-formula funding. On the academic side the foundation of the Centre for Archive Studies in 1996 completed what we hope may be the basis for greatly extended action in both the development of the archival holdings, the reconstruction of archive training, and the opportunity for research.

(Cook M. Changing Times, Changing Aims)

Commentary

The author has worked in some African countries for several years.

The Registrar - the chief administrative officer in a university.

The Merseyside Metropolitan County is one of the areas of Liverpool.

Assignment

Comprehension

1. Make up a list of topical vocabulary.

2. Prove with the help of the text that:

1. at the time the author was appointed to his post, there was no definite programme of studies and the author and his colleagues had to develop archives administration curriculum themselves;

2. records management is a very important service in a university;

3. Scottish universities had more chances than English universities to participate in developing archives services.

3. Compress to text to 6 sentences which, in your opinion, carry the main load

of logic.

Discussion

1. Say how Liverpool University archivists tried to find their niche in society.

2. Do you agree or disagree with the author when he says, ‘There are serious constraints in developing records management to a proper standard in a university’? Give your reasons.

3. Discuss the efforts taken by several individuals and organisations in order to work out a national policy on collecting archives in GB.

4. Draw the scheme of gradual development of archive services and university archive departments (units).

5. Tell your friens(s) about a university-archives relationship in Russia.

• Read the text. Make up a list of the words that can be joined under the headline ‘Archivist training’.

ROLES FOR THE ACADEMIC BASE OF THE PROFESSION

Teaching on what became the Master of Archive Administration degree course, over 28 years, has been more directly revealing of change than any other aspect of my professional work. In the early days the atmosphere was in many ways similar to what I had experienced at Bodley. My task was to represent what the historians termed 'practical' issues and subjects, and do my best to make sure that these had due weight on the course provided. This involved some in-fighting in meetings, but also a long dialogue with the main representative of traditional academic values, Dr Dorothea Oschinsky. I remember Dorothea with affection, and would like to say that our dialogue was rarely oppositional. She was open to new ideas, and in fact had a kind of fatalistic appreciation that her own disciplines would relatively decline. Her own historical work, indeed, was not entirely traditional. She will be remembered not only as the editor of a difficult medieval treatise, but also as an economic historian interested in the technicalities of accounting. The introduction of technical and business archives was therefore not an issue; and opposition to the teaching of management came from other quarters. Records management was a strong component of the course even in 1969, which shows that there was an immediate response to the Cambridge seminar of the year before. We began to include a short course on computing for archives in 1970.

Throughout the period 1968-1995 profound changes occurred in the weighting and character of the archives training course, but all these changes were gradual and were the result of ongoing debates within the profession, and our response to what we perceived as market pressures. Despite a requirement for some knowledge of Latin, still maintained (for the present, at least), the pressure of applications never ceased, so that we may claim, perhaps, that our main clients were satisfied with the general character of the curriculum. When the Society of Archivists began to recognise and formally visit the training courses, the dialogue between academics and professionals became more formalised, but this event did not in fact do much, directly, to alter the curriculum. The Society's visitors were articulating needs that we had ourselves largely recognised, and the kind of changes they asked for were those that we had been accustomed to develop ourselves. Pressures from the profession at large have therefore been to adapt and fine-tune, rather than to restructure - though we should remember that the overall effect, over time, has been quite radical.

The really radical changes have begun to occur in 1996 and will continue for the next few years, both at Liverpool and elsewhere. They stem from changes of government policy, university funding, the development of alternative methods of training, and from the impact of ideas and practices coming from other disciplines. Changes in the university courses also, of course, parallel changes in the organisation of the profession itself, and especially as far as this is manifested in the structure and role of the Society of Archivists.

Curiously, the advent of computing as a universal tool has not itself been very radical in its effect. At one time it appeared likely that computing for archives would become a distinct speciality in the profession, and a strongly-developing new curriculum element in the training courses. In 1988 I argued that it might replace the traditional palaeography as an infrastructural discipline for some archivists, since like the earlier studies, we would be obliged universally to use it, and it could supply many of the same techniques and qualities - exactness, ability to interpret texts, the production of reasoned means of access to documents. I was also one of those who, through most of the 1980s, thought that IT might be one of the factors unifying the information professions: the 'harmonisation' debate.

Both of these perceptions have proved to be wrong. There has been little perceptible harmonisation, even in small or developing countries, and currently there seems no debate on it, even in countries where archivists and librarians are trained alongside each other. The earlier view of the status of computing for archives is apparently just as dead. The student intake of 1996 is the first that has come through school and first degree experience with a ready command of computing techniques. This has made it obvious that teachers on archival courses do not have to train students in IT, which therefore ceases to be a distinct element in the course, and instead have the task of showing how the new technology might be used to support professional processes.

In one swift blow this development has halted what had been a curriculum element of growing importance, and replaced it with a field in which much of the research has still to be done. Although this development has certainly appeared at first as a setback, it is in fact a significant step forward, it has presented the academic centres with a viable field for their research and development work, and has greatly facilitated more traditional course elements (such as archive or records management) by providing effective tools ready to hand. Looking back, I now deeply regret having been one of those who tried, too early as we can now see, to train colleagues in primitive and undeveloped IT.

On the other hand, the coming of automation in general administration has presented us with the biggest and most urgent field of research since the rediscovery of the riches of our medieval archives in the late nineteenth century. Although much research work done in the richer countries has laid down a good base of theory, the practice of electronic records and archives management has all still to be done. Here is a major element in the research and development agenda for the next few years.

The enormous shake-up of higher education that started in 1992 and has not yet been fully worked through has by 1996 shown clearly that for the immediate future we shall not be left to develop our own training systems. The intake of students, the length and weighting of their (modularised) courses, the fees payable, and the allocation of scholarships or bursaries, are all undergoing change impelled from government agencies, or from Brussels. The actual subjects taught, of course, are still under the control of the teachers of professional subjects, aided by the Society of Archivists, but everything else is externally driven. This is a new experience, and not a cosy one.

In addition, we can now see that the most fundamental change in the atmosphere and character of university courses has been the introduction of an overriding pressure to raise money externally, and to expand numbers (within the same resource constraints) as rapidly as possible. Responding to the same pressures, new courses are appearing in other universities and colleges, and the competition these supply will undoubtedly also affect the older courses, as they will affect the general conditions of entry into the profession. This revolution in higher education is probably going to prove more fundamental than any of the more obvious changes in the conditions of professional work that have occurred in recent years, though it should be seen in conjunction with the great spread of the practice of employing people on short-term contracts.

(Cook M. Changing Times, Changing Aims)

Commentary

IT - information technology