IN 1950 the General Services Administration of the United

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1 Archival Training in a Record Center By EVERETT O. ALLDREDGE 1 National Archives and Records Service IN 1950 the General Services Administration of the United States Government instituted a nationwide system of Federal record centers. It did this to decrease operating costs by getting as many Government records as possible out of costly office space and first-quality office equipment. As the problem was big, the system had to be on a large scale. And recruiting suitable persons to operate the centers was naturally one of the most important steps toward getting them started. In the light of experience in the Army and Navy record centers between 1944 and 1950, the decision was made to build the staffs of the Federal record centers around a core of professional archivists with subprofessional helpers who would logically be classed as archives assistants. The writer had been one of a group detailed in 1947 to the Civil Service Commission to help issue qualification standards of experience and education for archivists and archives assistants. The standards set up by that group still control all initial civil service appointments to the record centers. On pages of his now standard text, Modern Archives; Principles and Techniques, T. R. Schellenberg describes a sound preparation for an archival career. In one paragraph he writes: The best preliminary training that an archivist can have, in my opinion, is advanced training in history. This provides him with a knowledge of the development of his country and its government, which is basic to any evaluation of the research values that are to be found in its public records. It provides him with training in research methodology, which is needed in all the work he does in rationalizing public records, in arranging them in proper relation with each other, and in describing them in terms of organization and function. 2 Needless to say, this is the official view of the National Archives and Records Service, and it is reflected in the qualification standards 1 Mr. Alldredge is Director of the Program Development Division, Office of Records Management, National Archives and Records Service. 2 T. R. Schellenberg, Modern Archives; Principles and Techniques, p. 131 (Chicago, 1956). 401

2 402 THE AMERICAN ARCHIVIST issued by the Civil Service Commission for archivists. The standards for archives assistants require less education and experience. While these standards were applied in making record center appointments, they did not by themselves ensure that the centers would be staffed with wholly competent archivists and archives assistants. To achieve that goal we had to develop a thoroughgoing inservice training program. In the Federal record centers it is assumed that the training of a staff member is continuous from the day he is employed until the day he leaves the service. The president of a big company has stated that management is in large measure an educational and training job. He illustrates this by saying that on one occasion a number of executives of his company analyzed exactly what management is in terms of specific operations and that, after all the typical operations were classified, 9 out of 10 were listed under education and training. This is certainly true in record center management. Each employee in the record centers is required to spend an hour a week on formal training in archival management. Only occasionally do the better center chiefs exercise their executive prerogative to dispense with this requirement when the workload is too heavy to permit it. The word formal, used in the preceding paragraph, is meant to differentiate planned academic training from what is popularly known as on-the-job training. Record centers, like all other organizations, give on-the-job training. In no other way could they get their work done. Formal training is often regarded as something an employee should get for himself outside office hours. Such an arrangement might serve well enough for record center personnel if educational institutions offered courses in record management and archival administration. Such courses at present, however, are almost nonexistent. Furthermore, once persons have met Federal employment standards, they cannot be required to undergo additional formal training outside office hours at their own expense. Let us first look at on-the-job training in the record centers. Every center supervisor has immediate responsibility for the onthe-job training of employees under his supervision. Part of this responsibility is professional: showing subordinates how to carry out work assignments in the most effective way, ensuring that they understand what is expected in terms of performance. The rest of this responsibility is managerial: i. Fostering a team spirit that will keep employees working together cooperatively and harmoniously on tasks that call for group action.

3 ARCHIVAL TRAINING IN A RECORD CENTER Developing in employees a sense of pride in and respect for the high standards of honesty, impartiality, integrity, courtesy, and dedication to the public interest that are a part of the tradition of the Federal service. 3. Learning what conditions will help employees do their best work, with enthusiasm and with personal satisfaction. 4. Reducing accidents and minimizing losses from breakage, spoilage, and waste. The managerial training given on the job should not be underplayed. As many archivists fail to climb the promotion ladder because of deficiency in such training as fail for lack of professional competence. But let me turn to the matter of formal training and ask what are its advantages in comparison with its cost? Why isn't on-thejob training enough? It has been our experience that formal training is less expensive than on-the-job training. One hour of formal training is equivalent to 3 hours of training on the job. It is less fragmentary. It is usually more thoughtful and more fundamental. It brings to light the pros and cons of our philosophies, attitudes, and beliefs. Terms are defined better and procedures are analyzed more thoroughly. Since training is basically a process of improving people in their knowledge, skill, attitudes, or behavior through instruction, demonstration, practice, planned experience, and other educational techniques, it should not be left to chance. It should be planned for career development. Professional skill is required in a record center for at least eight basic duties: (1) surveying, studying, and appraising Government records to determine their administrative, historical, legal, or other research value and whether they shall be preserved or disposed of; (2) organizing and arranging noncurrent records to facilitate their use and control without violating their organic unity or integrity; (3) selecting according to their value and physical condition records to be repaired for preservation as entities or reproduced for preservation in essence; (4) studying and analyzing permanently valuable records from a historical, administrative, and functional point of view and preparing analytical and descriptive finding aids to facilitate their use; (5) selecting and preparing appropriate records or bodies of records for publication; (6) giving reference or research service on records in the depository; (7) giving searchers advice about archival source materials and assistance in their use and interpretation; and (8) giving professional advice to Federal agencies with respect to the application of archival principles, policies, procedures, and techniques.

4 404 THE AMERICAN ARCHIVIST A good half of our formal training time is given to elucidating the professional duties listed above. Formal training is also given on the following topics: 1. The goals of the National Archives and Records Service. 2. Work measurement data and their place in budgetary planning. 3. The record center reporting system. 4. The permanent record program. 5. Archival literature, especially items in the record center library. 6. The function of the St. Louis personnel record center. 7. Study and analysis of the records of all Federal agencies participating in the record center program. 8. Letter writing. 9. Record management terminology. 10. Space conservation and control. 11. Fire and safety measures. 12. Answering the telephone. 13. Reading improvement. The most difficult training task is teaching how to describe records. Records are described in finding aids, in disposal schedules, in guides for scholarly use in short, record description is essential to all center work. Persons skilled in record description can prepare guides of far higher quality and in much less time than untrained persons can. The concept of the series, simply because it is conceptual, needs formal presentation to make certain that all its implications and all uses of the word series are covered. The study and analysis of the records of participating agencies is the next most difficult training area. An archivist must give considerable time and effort to reconstructing administrative history. Here his college training in history is important. He must assemble from accessioned files at the earliest possible moment all materials that show the organizational mutations an agency or office has undergone functional charts, personnel directories, organizational directives, and the like. This archival study of administrative history is necessary for intellectual mastery of the records in a center. Only through such study can we know where to look in noncurrent files for the specific documents and information that are called for. To give an example: U. S. Steel requested a certificate of necessity from the Supply Allocations and Priorities Board in the fall of It was denied. Today some Federal agency wants to know why, and requests the record center to produce all pertinent documentation. SAPB existed for 9 months. It took over a Council and was itself swallowed by WPB, which in turn had several major reorganizations. The WPB files today fill 60,000

5 ARCHIVAL TRAINING IN A RECORD CENTER 405 center boxes. In which of those 60,000 boxes are the desired documents to be found? Unless the archivist knows his administrative history, he will never find them. Archivists in the record centers must review and analyze the administrative history of every record group in their custody, in some cases as many as 200 record groups. A record group, in the archival terminology of Government, consists of the records of a bureau of some other unit of an executive department at the bureau level or the records of an independent agency of somewhat comparable importance. The third most difficult training area is in the use of principles of evaluation. Archivists in the centers are expected to recommend the final disposition for records, and this involves determining their future administrative, legal, or fiscal usefulness to a Federal agency. The archivist makes his recommendation according to the value of the records for research, for documenting an agency's functions, and for protecting the rights of citizens and of the Government. Part of the center training, as indicated, is taken up with the publications on archival management to be found in each center library such books as Dr. Schellenberg's, previously cited. But formal discussion of the principles of evaluation with mind activating mind, with a Socratic dialog of question and answer, and with the archival dialectic (if you will) of thesis and antithesis soon transcends all forms of book learning. To get instructors for the formal training at the record centers is a difficult but solvable problem. The chief of reference service can give training in record description and the chief of disposition can do the same for record evaluation. The agency record officers can give instruction on the records of their agencies. The Regional Director, National Archives and Records Service, is also available. Headquarters in Washington has issued 26 training lectures and a bibliography and has made available the professional publications of the National Archives staff. The textbook for the training course is the record center manual of operating procedures. For instruction in fire and safety measures the great resources of the Federal Government are at hand, including fire-prevention engineers. For letter writing there is a special 10-hour workshop, and for increasing speed and comprehension in reading the Armyindustry workshop is available. Agency training officers, especially the training officers of the General Services Administration, are willing to lend their services. In addition to their internal programs for archival staff develop-

6 406 THE AMERICAN ARCHIVIST ment, the record centers have actively supported and participated in the governmentwide administrative training programs, such as the various management intern programs. Every year each record center is "inspected" by a team from the Central Office of the General Services Administration in Washington. When the inspections are over, something like an annual personnel inventory takes place. We ask: "What employees are ready for promotion if a vacancy occurs for which the advice of Central Office is sought?" "What positions are the employees at the Grade 7 level and above likely to be qualified for in 2 years?" Although no formal roster results from this stocktaking, a reservoir of information is developed that can be drawn on as occasion arises. Fifty hours a years for each employee, year in and year out, may seem like a great deal of formal training. And yet those in the National Archives and Records Service in a good position to judge the results of the training have never doubted its value. Part of this value can be expressed quantitatively. For instance, the number of reference services performed per man-year has increased steadily each year, from 2,965 in 1951 to 9,320 in Or consider the unit cost of administering a cubic foot of records at a Federal record center. Note how each year the taxpayer gets more for his dollar: 1951, $1.35; 1952, $1.13; 1953, $0.92; 1954, $0.87; 1955, $0.67; 1956, $0.64; 1957, $0.63. There are other quantitative measurements that attest to the value received. But how about improvements in quality? These, too, can be measured. The shelf lists of 1957 are superior to those of 1951; the percentage of unsuccessful searches in the same record group has been reduced; the record evaluations hold up better under administrative crossfire. Above all, the employees act like archivists rather than file clerks. This is no invidious distinction; the two occupations are simply different. Archival depositories of the record center type may be defined as agencies or distinct organizational parts of agencies that receive and administer noncurrent records transferred in large blocks from other agencies or from the organizational units in which they were created or accumulated. The work of the archivist is accordingly distinguished from that of the file clerk in that the archivist, as such, has not participated in the creation or accumulation of the noncurrent records with which he must deal. He must therefore learn about their content, structure, functional significance, and administrative origin by research in all available printed sources and in the records themselves or by methodical inquiry among the of-

7 ARCHIVAL TRAINING IN A RECORD CENTER 407 ficials whose operations resulted in their creation or accumulation. The work of the archivist is further distinguished from that of the file clerk by the fact that the former must deal with a large number of systems for controlling the arrangement of noncurrent records, many of which are actually in a state of disarrangement. While records are still held within the agency of origin, reference service on them tends to decrease rapidly, and their arrangement tends to deteriorate as they become less used. The file clerk in an agency is concerned with only a few filing systems; the archivist must know from a hundred to a thousand such systems. Many filing systems reflect functions, and the functions of past organizations can be understood only through historical analysis. The National Archives and Records Service is trying to develop among its employees the ideal of a strong career service. The writer has tried to show in a small way how its record centers have a planned career-development program. Training under this careerdevelopment program will assure good performance from all staff members. It will provide an adequate source of qualified replacements to fill all vacant positions above the entrance level, for which the Civil Service Commission can be relied upon to furnish adequate personnel.