The theme of the Working Meeting of Graduate Archival Educators is research in and research about graduate level archival education. The two major topics to be addressed will be (1) to begin to assess how effective graduate level archival programs are in preparing their graduates to work as records professionals and (2) to identify the process and problems associated with establishing research programs within graduate archival education programs.
In order to address the first issue, the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh is conducting an extensive survey of graduates of a number of archival and records management programs in the United States. It is hoped that the results of this survey, which will be presented at the Working Meeting, will faciliate discussion of these important issues.
Graduate Archival Education
Graduate archival and records management programs have shown remarkable growth over the past decade, adding new faculty and expanding the curricula. One could argue that graduate archival education is becoming the major route of entry into the archival profession. However, growth has occurred without developing any serious evaluation about the relative success of these programs. It is time for graduate archival educators to stop and consider how well they are doing in training the records professionals of the twenty-first century. Such an analysis is essential if graduate archival educators are to strengthen the curriculum, improve their current job placement ratio, provide more effective career advising, and plan for continuing education.
Graduate Archival Research
Archival educators are well aware of the difficulty of obtaining funding to support graduate archival research. In the interest of the larger archival profession, it is essential for educators to explore options for promoting archival research. This consideration must include the identification of priority areas for graduate archival research.