Rachel Howse Binnington asked an interesting question of the Archives and of the Records Management List subscribers at the beginning of the week. Rachel said, "I was curious to know if there has ever been any discussion about coming up with a dual certification or an Archives and Records Management Institute type of thing where people could take an advanced certification in both." I'm not certified in either field, so I'm interested in what people who are certified in both might think of her question. I can't speak to certification but this did get me thinking. Although it is an interesting idea, I see some potential challenges here. Especially after reading comments about the CA process, with some people arguing that questions could have more than one right answer, that context means a lot, etc. I understand why employers look for certification and why certified archivists and RMs find it a benefit. But the two professions are different. Moreover, context means an awful lot, also. Beyond that, both the employer and the job applicant have to have some sense of what makes the best fit in an organization. What works in one place might not in another. Some organizations are very rigid, hierarchical, ritualistic and premised on a strict order and loyalty up the line. They may depend on conformity, sometimes for valid reasons, sometimes because simply because the boss sets such a tone. Fail to conform and you may find yourself ostracized, voted "off the island," fired. Others take a different view of what it takes to keep an organization's good name. They even may rely on employees at all levels speak up or to juggle and balance competing interests. If you're a top-down type of person, you may find dealing with empowered or free-thinking subordinates to be very frustrating. Still other organizations fall somewhere in between, relying neither on "strict father" authoritarian environments nor broadly empowered employees. You have to recognize the organizational type that fits best with your personality and temperament. Certification tells employer and employee something about knowledge, it doesn't reveal much about personality types and situational ethics. Today's Washington Post reports that the U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler, who ruled yesterday in the tobacco litigation said that "the companies "suppressed research, they destroyed documents, they manipulated the use of nicotine so as to increase and perpetuate addiction . . . and they abused the legal system in order to achieve their goal -- to make money with little if any regard for individual illness and suffering, soaring health costs, or the integrity of the legal system. . . . The judge saved a few pointed comments for the lawyers who have represented the tobacco industry over the past 50 years. At every stage, lawyers played an absolutely central role in the creation and perpetuation of the Enterprise and the implementation of its fraudulent schemes," she wrote. They "hid the relationship between . . . witnesses and the industry; and THEY DEVISED AND CARRIED OUT DOCUMENT DESTRUCTION POLICIES and took shelter behind baseless assertions of the attorney client privilege," the judge wrote. "What a sad and disquieting chapter in the history of an honorable and often courageous profession." [END EXTRACT] That's an extreme case, a high profile situation where a judge ends up castigating people for suppression of facts and destruction of records. There are all sorts of scenarios a RM or archivist may face, with all kinds of tricky nuances. As I mentioned in earlier postings, I've been mulling over some of these, in light of the certification debate. So, here goes. A records manager (or archivist) might work for a small private sector firm where he knows the boss and the top managers. The company provides him and others with good jobs and secure employment. Without getting into the question of whether or not the product they produce is good and safe or faulty, what if the company suddenly faced litigation? Pertinent records might have existed at one time but had a relatively short retention period. There may have been some debate among the creators, lawyers and the records manager about the correct retention period. The lawyers and corporate managers may have expressed a view that "this could be dangerous to leave around." Their views prevailed and the RM went ahead and scheduled the records as temporary, with short retention, despite some misgivings. (Let's stipulate that there was no regulatory or legal requirement that governed and set retention. However, the RM knew that best practices usually resulted in a longer retention period. Something in the environment in the company made others reluctant to accept longer retention, however.) The company receives a document discovery request. The company's lawyers breathe a sigh of relief -- no paper trail to haunt the defendants. The plaintiffs do not prevail in court and the matter is dropped. The records manager might easily go about his business, and, since he likes his boss and wants the company to succeed in its enterprises, may think,"well, whatever was in those records, we followed our schedule, our decision to schedule them was discretionary, rather than regulatory. They're gone, we dodged a bullet, and everything is ok." But what if the records belong to the government, not a company? And there is a public interest in the matter, which has national import? The situation can take a very different twist, here. The stakes are different, for one thing. Maybe the records deal with the Vietnam War. I use that example because we archivists had marked for public release a written note of President Nixon's comment about negotiations to end the war: "Tell Henry [Kissinger] get best deal -- let [South Vietnam's President Nguyen Van] Thieu paddle his own canoe." In this case, Nixon's lawyers asked for the document, among thousands of others, to be removed permanently from NARA custody and returned to Nixon. The note, which has pertinence in understanding how the administration dealt with its ally, South Vietnam, might then never see the light of day. After 10 years of wrangling, NARA finally upheld its archivists' judgment. In the meantime, all the public saw was newspaper stories where Nixon's lawyers were quoted as saying archivists were violating Nixon's privacy. In such a case, the people working with such records might feel badly if they were forced to suppress information that archival case law suggested archivists should release. Of course, in such a situation, whether you like "the boss" or not is not at issue. Federal officials have Constitutional obligations that do not change from administration to administration. And the public relies on an archivist or RM to do the right thing, regardless of whether he or she had voted for the official who created the records. (I was glad to hear former Nixon Project director Jim Hastings say at SAA at the Roberts forum that all the archivists with whom he ever has worked have handled their responsibilities professionally, without regard to personal politics or feelings. Jim also mentioned the Supreme Court ruling which upheld the Nixon records statute in 1974. He said one of the justices noted the long record of integrity of archivists in handling Presidential records.) What about scheduling records of records, let's say in the private sector. Should a RM just say, "sure," if an official leaned on him to find his way to interpret what actually were policy records, which other entities kept for a long time, as being merely administrative and ephemeral in nature? And it was clear this mis-classification was being done blatantly as a way to get rid of the records quickly. Would he push the lawyers to make the agency conform to best practices in records management? Or should he go along to get along? Doesn't the extent to which you can push the lawyers depend on the type of organization you're working in? In some environments, people are fired if they don't do what the most powerful officials direct them to do. Also, the statute that underlies the handling of records makes a difference. So, I'll skip back to the Federal sector. NARA's Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library is a pre-Watergate, donor restricted Library. From what I've heard, LBJ and his surrogates had a lot of say over archival matters. Some of the testimony in Kutler v. Wilson centered on Nixon tapes archivists' reluctance to cut out portions of Watergate Special Prosecutor Tape segments without the public being informed that Nixon was the source. We met with John T. Fawcett on this matter; he then headed NARA's Office of Presidential Libraries. Mr. Fawcett was asked about a number of Library practices during the subsequent Kutler litigation. He looked back at his prior experiences in responding to some of the questions. John T. Fawcett's deposition transcript shows that when LBJ asked for an exception to standard practice, the Johnson Library's "archivists objected to that strenuously. Unfortunately, when the former President says that's what he wants done, you do it." (Civ. A. 92-0662, Kutler v. Don Wilson, Fawcett deposition, original transcript, pages 230-231) In the case of the Nixon materials, Congress was at some pains to approve regulations to insulate working level archivists from being surreptiously asked by the former President to delete information from his historical records. The regulations approved by Congress were posted for public comment in the Federal Register and the public had every reason to believe we would follow them. In the Kutler case, I testified about a meeting we archivists had with Mr. Fawcett about a list of deletions submitted to NARA by Mr. Nixon without public, regulatory notice. I testified that in discussing concerns with colleagues and supervisors, "I also expressed an opinion that we weren't serving the former president very well, and that's based on the fact that I had worked on Mr. Nixon's '68 campaign and was known amongst staff members as someone who had supported him in his policies and had some personal sympathy for him. I felt that the worst thing that could happen to him would be to be accused of covering up the cover-up, and that we should protect him as well as ourselves and act in conformance with our regulations." [Krusten deposition, Civil Action 92-662-NHJ, 96-97, 111, 112, 113, September 22, 1992] We NARA Nixon Project archivists were keenly aware of the fact that the Nixon materials fell under a statute that was different in application and intent from the one that covered other Presidential Libraries. All of which is a way of saying, whether you plan to work in the public or private sector, it's awfully hard to judge from a test how people are going to react in any job environment. You can test knowledge, but that's only one part of the equation. In my view, you have to consider nuance. You have to consider not only the laws and regulations, but also power equations. And whether or not agency lawyers are willing to stick to regulations, support subordinate employees, and generally to take the high road. Or whether they will wink and nod at the ignoring of legislative intent. Some will act one way, some will act the other way. Or, in a bad luck scenario in the private sector, whether you are working with people who support practices that might be castigated by a judge, as happened in the tobacco case I mentioned above. When you come right down to it, archivist or RM, private or Federal, it ultimately comes down to dealing with people, with all their innate characterstics. Put in the same situation, people might even interpret their primary obligations differently. There also can be applications of situational ethics rather than absolute standards. Some situations require some flexibility, others play out best when there is strict adherence to certain rituals or practices. So, I can see where questions asked for certification might be premised on certain conditions which may vary or even may be hard to find in the real world. Maarja ________________________________________________________________________ Check out AOL.com today. Breaking news, video search, pictures, email and IM. All on demand. Always Free. A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List sponsored by the Society of American Archivists, www.archivists.org. For the terms of participation, please refer to http://www.archivists.org/listservs/arch_listserv_terms.asp. To subscribe or unsubscribe, send e-mail to [log in to unmask] In body of message: SUB ARCHIVES firstname lastname *or*: UNSUB ARCHIVES To post a message, send e-mail to [log in to unmask] Or to do *anything* (and enjoy doing it!), use the web interface at http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html Problems? Send e-mail to Robert F Schmidt <[log in to unmask]>