ABSTRACT
Formal education for archivists over the past ten years has been subjected to considerable study. While archives administrators have been educated people, it is only within recent memory that an array of formal programs have been developed to acquaint students with the issues, problems, and procedures relevant to managing archival collections. This effort has been fueled by the appearance of ever more vexing problems facing those who deal with modern archives. The increasingly complex problems of selection, arrangement, preservation, bulk, legal considerations, and new technology, have formed the basis of curricula established for the training of archivists. Such the efforts for formal education of archivists lies at a crossroads. On the one hand, archives and archivists can envision a separate discipline and separate identity based on a set of issues unique to their collections and institutions; on the other, in the wake of rapidly developing technology and new conceptual models of interactive information systems, many issues and problems once thought unique to archives now have wider applications. From an information perspective, much of what was once the exclusive concern of archivists constitutes methods or organization of information with a multitude of uses.
