In the interest of full disclosure, I’m
president of the Academy of Certified Archivists, but this is not an official
Academy response to the recent listserv postings. These are my own ramblings. I
don’t want to respond to every point, but two issues arose that are interests
of mine and I’d like to briefly offer my perspective on those. First, why take the archival certification
examination? For reasons I won’t bore you with here (but that involve the
Academy spending a great deal of time and money with a professional
psychometrician statistically analyzing not only every year’s test, and not
only every question on every year’s test, but every option of every question on
every year’s test), I’m convinced the test is a solid certification
examination. It’s not doctoral comps. It’s not an end of semester exam. It’s
not a pop quiz. It is a certification examination, which has a different
mission, a different purpose, and a different methodology based on long
accepted systematic practices, both professional and legal, in the testing
field. But even though the Academy can prove that
every year’s exam accurately and fairly tests for what it was intended to test,
to me, that is not the most important reason to take it. I think more important
reasons for taking the exam are: (1) it shows you have the self-confidence to
test your knowledge against a consensus national standard; and (2) it shows
that you give a damn. That is, it shows that you have the personal initiative
to fill out the aggravating paperwork, catch up on your reading, travel to an
exam site (often at significant personal expense), sit down in a room full of
strangers and put your knowledge on the line. The opportunity at a professional
level to express, in such a concrete way, that kind of initiative, self-confidence,
and faith in your own abilities, and to do so in a forum governed by the
highest professional psychometric and testing standards, is very rare. I see no
benefit in letting it pass by. The other question was why pass the test,
and then take it again several years later? Because the certification
examination is the archival profession’s most important self-evaluation tool.
As someone explained, you don’t have to take the test again to recertify. You
can choose instead to recertify by petition, which is the archival profession’s
only system for recognizing your participation in activities that help you keep
up with the field. But instead of dealing with the petition
paperwork, you can opt to take the test again, and that is what I encourage people
to do. Simply taking the test, seeing how it has changed since you last took
it, reading new questions and thinking about what changes in technology,
theory, or practice motivated those questions, reviewing your score report and
learning in which areas you were stronger, all of those are invaluable
self-evaluation opportunities. Few professions have strong self-evaluation
tools. Archivists are fortunate to have one based on consistent standards and
created according to a systematic, professional, validated process. I see no
benefit in letting it pass by. For information about the Academy,
including how the test is constructed, how to qualify to take it, how to hold
the examination in your hometown, you are welcome to visit the Academy’s web
site at www.certifiedarchivists.org. Lee ==--00--== Leon C. Miller, Manuscripts Librarian Special Collections, Jones Hall,
Howard-Tilton Memorial Library Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70118 Ph: 504-865-5685, Fx: 504-865-5761 Leon.Miller@tulane.edu http://specialcollections.tulane.edu NB: Unless specified in the text, there are
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