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Re: Archival Certification Comments to ACA President



1/2/01

Charles,

      Thank you for your comments to me on Dec. 20.  I appreciated your lengthy response and your personal reasons for becoming certified.  I do accept that you and others believe that the exam is not only useful but necessary for our profession.  But believing that it is useful and being able to show that it is are two separate things.

       Your argument that  the certification exam is the only instrument that can truly validate the masters with archival training, etc. doesn't acknowledge that our advanced degree programs and courses required far more than one exam to validate our knowledge and acquired skills.  Our coursework and internships required lengthy research and processing projects/final papers and yes, *many* exams for us to get our degrees.  So the certification exam, it seems to me, is a solution in search of a need.  (So, what about archivists with no formal academic training to speak of?  Shouldn't our profession be encouraging and recommend continuing education and graduate degree programs?  Ah, but that is a corollary discussion to this one--)

       I just don't understand why legitimate questioning of ACA and the exam is seen as "attacking" the ACADEMY and attacking certified archivists.  I resent the implication that I am less concerned about my profession because I still question the need for a certification exam.  I have received much support for my comments off-line by many who just don't want to go on the record, but who also have legitimate concerns about the real need for the exam/process.   Charles, I just don't think the MLS degree acceptance example is equivalent to the CA exam debate.       
      
      If the CA exam process was truly a measure of being a qualified archivist, and if it were seen to provide tangible (not wishful) benefits to professional archivists then I would be fully supportive of it.  You have to realize that CA  will never be accepted by either archivists or employers unless it provides real  benefits to the archival community--personal satisfaction is not a realistic benefit related to the expense and preparation time required for the exam.    

      I got the ACA membership figures, i.e. 700,  from ACA themselves recently (as well as the SAA membership figures from SAA) and they indicated that ACA membership had remained fairly constant since 1989 with a dip to less than 600 members a few years ago.  It seems that the CA recidivism rate is fairly high.

        My specific questions to Lee Stout about doing an ACA membership study to determine demographics/composition (who is taking the exam and why?) as well as to examine recidivism (why do people let their membership lapse?) are solid questions which have not been addressed as far as I know.   I'm sure that you realize that dismissing questions related to whether there are any benefits to be gained from the CA designation will not make the questions go away.

        As many others have already mentioned, even with appropriate academic and advanced archival training, often archivists are ill-equipped to deal with all of the vast and varied archival decisions that are necessary in the real world. (Multi-media decisions, reformatting collections, records migration and electronic records decisions come readily to mind.) To believe that an short exam can measure any kind of archival competence just seems to be quite foolhardy to me.

      Anyway, thanks again for your response, Charles. My main point, still, is that without real, substantial professional benefits to archivists, why become certified?
Best wishes from an original Oklahoman and hope  that you have a good new year--
                  Sincerely,  Lucinda