Drama in the archival world? Who would have thought? You may have heard about the two archivists at the University of Oregon who handed over close to 22,000 school records to an economics professor just for the asking. One archivist has since resigned. The remaining archivist was recently placed on administrative leave. There is a petition going to reinstate him, and more than 100 University of Oregon professors have signed. This interesting information came from Fierce Content Management in their article, “The side of records management we rarely see.”
The petition declared that university managers have failed to manage records properly and to give librarians enough resources to handle them, and that the archivist on paid administrative leave had actually helped to fix a longstanding, ‘deplorable’ records situation, and should not be fired.
This shows a side of recordkeeping that’s rarely seen. Records management is a vital component of organizations that’s rarely given much thought until things go wrong.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
