Hi,
There are many elements which could be used as critera to
judge whether archivists are a profession .You may understand how archivists are
a profession in China according to different criteria. According to my
view, only these three are enough to give the conclusion that archivists are a
profession in China literally.
First, China has a centralised and independent national
archival administrative system from central level to provincial level, muncipal
level, city level, county level, district level. There are independent archival
administrations at different levels within different locality. China has a
unified Archival Law which guides archival work of the whole country covering
all the e.g.sectors, government, institution, business; public and
private.
Second,China has complete and independent archival education
programs covering different levels from Ph.D, MA, BA,to secondary school
education. It has independent Archival College, Archival Department, Archival
Major in university .
Third, China has independent archival personnel
management systems for upgrading and assessing the qualifications of archivists
and their professional titles e.g assistant archivists,archivists, senior
archivists etc.
However, it is worth to mention that archival profession are
not highly respected in socitey compared with librarians and information
managers in China. You can not judge the respect according to facilities equiped
in archival repository. Since archival work are different from library work, the
importance of archives determines it deserves the particular better physical
environment and facility than books.
In practice, though archivists are a profession in
practice, archival work in China has just on a normalised and legalised
way, archival work are not to the standard of professional work like
lawyers , architect, etc. which are much independent and objective judged by
professional codes. In china, most citizens have very little archival
conciousness, they know books but seldom archives. The same is archivist and
librarian. Librarian may seems more close to citizen's work and life and have
been looked as contributors to the knowledge of humankind. Well, archivist may
seems only close to leaders or government, archivists may still looks as
custodians of confidential materials of whom in power. At the same time,
there are many difficulties and obstacles for archivists to have real
archival authority for archival work.It is very hard for archivists to implement
their collecting and acquisition policies in real world.
It is my opinion that Chinese archivists have tried very
hard to be a real profession both in theory and practice. It could be saying
that it is a profession in theory, but it is not a real profession in real world
yet.
发件人: Maclin, Susan <Susan.Maclin@AIG.COM>
收件人: ARCHIVES@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU <ARCHIVES@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU> 日期: 2000年4月28日 18:48 主题: Chinese archivists.
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