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

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