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
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