67.Managing Archives and Records Programs. The management of archives and records programs is universally important, although it has generally been handled by basic manuals and textbooks, many described earlier in this technical report. To be perfectly honest, the treatment of management of archival and other records programs has been one of the weakest aspects in the professional literature. The sparseness of research about matters such as the costs of archival processing (the arranging and describing of historical records) and the manner in which archival records are used are indicative that administrative issues often take a backseat to most other concerns in archival programs. In many cases, management studies (or the closest we get to management studies) turn out mostly to be comparative studies missing any detailed glimpses into the inner workings of archival programs. Frances O’Donnell, “Reference Service in an Academic Archives,” Journal of Academic Librarianship 26 (March 2000): 110-118, an otherwise fine description of administering the archival reference service at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology archives, devotes more space to making comparisons between archival work and librarianship than it does to analyzing the nature of an archival reference program. If archivists continue to spend so much of their energies trying to describe what they are, rather than in studying how their programs work, they will continue to suffer from a lack of insights into their own management. The classic statement pointing out the problems with archivists and their views toward management is David Bearman’s Archival Methods (Pittsburgh: Archives and Museum Informatics, 1989), a careful dismantling of archivists’ assumptions about the core functions of their work.

68.There are some noteworthy studies, mostly done by individuals outside of the archives field. Here are some examples of some of the more important studies on the management of archives and records program or how archives relate to management. Two very important, companion volumes are Jed I Bergman in collaboration with William G. Bowen and Thomas I. Nygren, Managing Change in the Nonprofit Sector: Lessons from the Evolution of Five Independent Research Libraries (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1996) and Kevin M. Guthrie, The New-York Historical Society: Lessons from One Nonprofit’s Long Struggle for Survival (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1996), both focusing on the difficult fiscal management of such programs. Both are intended to provide insights into non-profits management. The Guthrie study is especially important as it relates the traditional collecting emphasis of this institution with its fiscal management woes.

69.Beyond such studies as these, there are interesting articles in the professional literature where the management of archival programs is put into a broader context, such as my "Fund Raising for Historical Records Programs: An Underdeveloped Archival Function," Provenance 6, no. 2 (Fall 1988): 1-19 and E. C. Goodman, "Records Management as an Information Management Discipline: A Case Study from SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals," International Journal of Information Management 14 (April 1994): 134-143. Records professionals obviously also need to delve into the research and other literature of organizational management, where they might discover work concerning the way records are used, such as Richard J. Bolland, "Sensemaking of Accounting Data as a Technique of Organizational Diagnosis," Management Science 30/7: 868-882 and Barbara Levitt and James G. March, “Organizational Learning,” reprinted in Michael D. Cohen, M. D. and Lee Sproull, eds., Organizational Learning (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), pp. 516-540. Within the broader information professions and its literature, there is also literature with implications for understanding the management of records and closely related materials, such as Ellen Crosby, "Outsourcing becomes Insourcing: Cataloging Ephemeral Trade Literature at the Indiana Historical Society Library," in Outsourcing Library and Technical Services Operations: Practices in Academic, Public, and Special Libraries, Karen A. Wilson and Marylou Colver, eds. (Chicago: American Library Association, 1997), pp. 179-189. Such citations suggest the need for archivists and other records professionals to become more regular readers of the organizational management literature and to draw on such studies to do their own research into how organizations manage their records programs. In the meantime, readings depicting the evolution of records and recordkeeping systems will have to be the main pointers to have archives are managed.