Sonderband 2. International Council on Archives. Dritte Europäische Archivkonferenz, Wien 11. bis 15. Mai 1993. Tagungsprotokolle (1996)

3. Session / Séance. Sharing of Experience and Exchange of Staff / Partage d’Expériences et Echange des Personnes - Huyda, Richard: Coordination Research in Archival Sience and Dissemination of Professional Information / Coordination de la recherche en archivistique et diffusion de l’information professionnelle (english 231 - français 251)

Just as much as the people we serve, therefore, we need information to solve the problems that we have to face in the practice of our profession as well as to adjust our discipline to the needs of the moment.

Access to professional information, in fact, is doubly important for us: it enables us to find the means to respond to the vital needs of our clientele - for whom the information that we preserve and process has become an essential resource - while playing this same special role as a tool for development and success for ourselves.

In a managerial context geared to planning and forecasting, perceiving and communicating fresh needs, consulting technical sources, procedures for joint action, consultation and communication, sharing experience, management by project, the business intelligence system, multiplying and developing cooperative relationships20, the management of organic and recorded information has become a major asset for the survival of any organization. The collective or institutional „memory“ to which we constantly refer has become the receptacle for all this past experience, all these transactions, all the expertise on which its owner’s future is based. The more we enjoy rapid and effective access to the professional information we need to properly assume our responsibilities, the more our clientele will benefit from the fruits of our knowledge and practice. The more access we have to the „memory“ made up of the experience and labours of our fellow archivists and our colleagues from other disciplines, the more effectively we will be able to preserve and strategically reactivate the informational funds of our sponsoring bodies and provide our external clients with the information they need, when they need it.

Disseminating information has become a necessity for the survival of the organizations to which we belong and of our clients. Anyone denying this fact would be displaying a tragic ignorance of the imperatives of our socioeconomic system. And if the result of this ignorance were to be to restrain or even annihilate our capacity for accessing professional information in archival science, no one would have gone more cheerfully to disaster.

Professional responsibilities

Having stressed the need to disseminate professional information in terms of our responsibilities towards others, how about our duties to ourselves as professionals?

The sociologists who have attempted to define this specific group that we term „profession“ agree that a profession is typified by:

1. social recognition of its importance;

2. a body of scientific knowledge and a specialized training program;

3. the promotion of common objectives through a corporate structure; and

4. a shared culture encompassing group standards, values and mode of expression21.

3. Session/Séance: Marcoux - Huyda, Coordinating Research in archivai Science

20 See: G. Archier etH. Sérieyx: L’entreprise du 3e type.

21 M y k 1 an d, Liv: Protection and Integrity - The Archivist’s Identity and Professionalism, in: Papers of the Xllth International Congress on Archives, Montréal, 1992 (ARCHIVUM vol. XXXIX), p. 99-109.

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