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)

Gathered in a corporation, the members of a profession thus share both a body of knowledge and a common culture. This sharing presupposes the free movement and exchange of ideas, points of view, principles, rules, research conclusions - in short, professional information.

As Carole Séguin judiciously emphasizes, in fact, a profession is „a scholarly activity, meaning that it arises from specialized training and evolves in a strictly intellectual context“22. And it is this training and research, of which professional information emerges as both the basis and the product, which determines the history and evolution of this intellectual context.

In other words, without professional information, the archival profession would probably never have emerged. And even if it had, it would at least have been condemned to sclerosis and suffocation.

Obstacles and incentive factors

Do the socioeconomic and professional imperatives that we have mentioned give us tounderstand that information exchange is one of these things which, being automatic, meet with no obstacles?

We would not wish to leave you with this impression, as the need has not and does not ensure its free flow, still less its coordinated development.

The fact is that the wave of neoliberalism that has swept the Western world in the last ten years has imposed its implacable law of competition on the whole range of economic forces and social players. As Hervé Sérieyx has very justly reminded us23, the globalization of the capitalist economy, the rapid growth of worldwide production and the increase in worldwide exchanges, have exacerbated the rivalries among individuals, institutions and public bodies. Now when we speak of „rivalry“, we are also referring to a natural tendency to secrecy, withdrawal, to protect and monopolize all expertise and factors that can procure the slightest advantage in the market for goods and services.

Beyond this socioeconomic conjuncture, we must not forget that, as professionals and researchers, we have been literally swamped in a single decade by the production of professional documentation and information. None of us can boast any more of having read everything or lay claim to overall mastery of the new developments in archival science, withits supplementary disciplines, techniques and sciences.

In addition to this quantitative limitation, we must also admit to a degree of qualitative powerlessness when it comes to the overspecialization that is seen in archival science as elsewhere. A number of us, facing certain high-tech developments for example, can only gauge our ignorance and deplore the lack of time that would enable us to keep our expertise up to date. Discoveries now occur at too fast a

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

Séguin, Carole: L’éthique en archivistique: signe de professionnalisation, in: Réflexions archivistiques, Montréal, Ecole de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l’information, p. 114.

See: Présentation de Hervé Sérieyx à la Conférence „La fonction publique et le service au citoyen“, [Ottawa], Centre canadien de gestion, 3 mars 1992, p. 18-19.

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