Australian Society of Archivists
1999 Conference

Accreditation: Purpose, Process And Value

Sigrid McCausland

• Introduction
• Background and Purpose
• Process - The Criteria
• Process - The Procedures
• Value - Issues Facing the ASA in Accreditation
• Footnotes

Introduction

This session looks at education for the profession: something central to our daily lives as practitioners. I will be considering accreditation not only as a formal process, but also as an activity interwoven with other objectives and collective endeavours which characterise the archival profession in Australia today. The past five or so years have seen major shifts in our profession’s approach to standards and I hope to demonstrate that this is no less so in recent developments in the area of accreditation as in our approach to the work of recordkeeping itself.

I will begin by looking at accreditation per se: what it is and what it is not, looking at definitions and the Australian Society of Archivists (ASA)’s role. I will then sketch in the background to the current accreditation program, which began in early 1997 when Council decided that it was time to revive the Society’s activities in this area. I will then describe the criteria and procedures adopted in 1998 and now being used in the present round of accreditations, due to be completed next year. The paper will conclude with an examination of some of the major issues facing the ASA in accreditation in challenging times for higher education.

At the outset, I should note that our use of the term accreditation is somewhat misleading, although we persist in using that term as a label for the activity and the formal structure which has responsibility for it, the Accreditation Committee.⁽¹⁾ What the ASA is doing — and this is reflected in the policy documents I will discuss later — is more accurately described as course recognition. Accreditation is correctly used in those cases where a professional association has the power to control entry to the profession and thus to confer on the individual the right to practise (as with the Australian Medical Association and doctors). This power is complemented by the power to withdraw that right to practise. However, as those with long experience in the archives profession in Australia and especially in the ASA itself well know, the ASA has never had such powers — we cannot prevent anyone from either adopting the title of archivist or claiming the knowledge and skills of our profession. It is also important to note that the object of the ASA’s accreditation activities is to recognise courses offered by universities, not to accredit individuals as archivists nor to redefine the status of eligibility for professional membership of the ASA.

Background and Purpose

I will now turn to the framework for the ASA’s accreditation activities since the first meeting of the Accreditation Committee in May 1997. The first issue to explore is why should the ASA be involved in accreditation at all? There are several answers to this question, but the basic reason is that the ASA from its formation in 1975 has always regarded education as one of its key interests. The objectives of the ASA include the following: “[to] establish and maintain standards of archival practice and professional conduct amongst archivists, including standards of archival qualifications and professional training”.⁽²⁾

While the ASA’s involvement in education took various forms in the early years, accreditation of university courses was initially not one of its activities. In 1982, the archives course at the University of New South Wales was accredited by the Library Association of Australia (LAA), with Michael Piggott serving as ASA representative on the LAA accreditation panel. The ASA then took the first steps towards its own accreditation program in the mid 1980s when it formulated policies on accreditation. Before the Accreditation Committee commenced its work in May 1997, the last round of accreditations had taken place under the auspices of the Education Committee in 1992-1993.

The current round of course accreditations marks a distinct shift from the ASA’s previous work in this area, incorporating as it does significant recent developments in the areas of standard-setting, training and in our professional self-definition. Here I refer to the publication of the Australian Standard on Records Management (AS4390), the development and endorsement of the National Records and Archives Competency Standards and to the widespread acceptance of the continuum model. The ASA itself and a number of individual members were heavily involved in bringing AS4390 and the competencies into being, so it follows that we have an interest in monitoring their application in the training environment. While some may be reluctant to acknowledge the recordkeeping label, it is a reality that as a professional association we need to be involved at the outset, not lagging behind, in debates over the level, range and content of education options available for those who wish to work as recordkeeping professionals, including those who may specialise in what might be seen as “traditional” archives work. Today we are working in closer cooperation than previously with our colleagues in records management and this also informs our approach to accreditation. We have liaised with the Records Management Association of Australia (RMAA) in the current round, notably in timing some accreditation visits, although we have not managed to produce joint criteria.

So, what does it take to put in place an accreditation program? The tasks before the new Accreditation Committee were many: to define and publicise the overall philosophy behind the ASA’s involvement in accreditation, to develop criteria for recognition, to devise procedures to support the process of accreditation, to organise the individual accreditation exercises with the universities and to report to Council. The Committee thus straddles policy and process roles, being responsible for both formulating policy recommendations to Council and coordinating and implementing a program of course accreditations in universities.

From the beginning, the Accreditation Committee⁽³⁾ has considered it important to articulate the framework of its activities and to publicise them. Its first efforts to provide what was initially called a statement of professional knowledge met with some resistance when presented for discussion within the ASA (over the listserv and at an informal meeting with educators at the ASA conference in Adelaide in July 1997). The problem here was that our statement sought to prescribe requirements for knowledge and skills possessed by the professional archivist. We returned to the task and a formulated a simpler, general statement of the parameters of the ASA’s participation in accreditation and the standards which would be used in accrediting qualifications and courses. ASA Council approved this statement, together with the criteria for course recognition and the procedures, at its meeting in May 1998.

The procedures describe the purpose and process of accreditation thus:

• the purpose of recognition is to establish, maintain and improve the quality of education of records professionals;
• it is a benchmark for assessing the suitability for professional membership, and,
• the process is constructive in its evaluation and carried out with integrity and in an accountable manner.

Process — The Criteria

I will now summarise the main features of the ASA criteria for course recognition and the accompanying procedures which provide the guidelines for the whole process.⁽⁴⁾ Our starting point for the whole endeavour of putting into practice the ASA’s objectives concerning educational standards is the basis for the granting of professional membership of the ASA. To become a professional member, a person must complete an accredited university course and have one year’s experience as an archivist.⁽⁵⁾ The new criteria allow for accreditation of three types of course: undergraduate, postgraduate diploma and coursework masters. We do not accredit research degrees (research masters and doctorates) because we consider graduates from these courses would already meet the criteria for professional membership. Nor do we accredit TAFE courses, because of the requirement that professional members must be university graduates.

The key feature of the criteria is the use of the records and archives competency standards to assess courses. This is a departure from previous practice and could be seen as controversial, given the less than enthusiastic response from universities to the whole competency movement. However, the competencies provide a more objective measure for assessing courses across several universities and one which is more public than earlier ASA criteria for recognition. As this is not the place for a history of the development of the records and archives competencies, let alone an introduction to the principles and structures of the national training framework of which competencies are but one element, I intend to limit my focus to the basic role of the competencies as an evaluation tool in our accreditation process.⁽⁶⁾ The criteria state that graduates of the course/s being assessed will possess the skills and/or knowledge set out in the National Records and Archives Competency Standards at Level 5, with some additional requirements at Level 4 and understanding of Level 6 and awareness of Level 7 competency standards. This approach is an inclusive one, which allows space for employment in various archival settings, and also recognises that archivists will at times be in the position of sole recordkeeping professional within an organisation.

There are two additional points to mention here. One is that while the ASA acknowledges that universities include content from other disciplines in recordkeeping courses, for example computing and conservation, for the purposes of accreditation, we require only that graduates meet records and archives competencies and not those from other areas. The second point is that we state that we understand that universities cannot equip graduates for institution-specific knowledge of the many and varied archival settings they may encounter on entering the workplace. However, we also state that it is expected that universities will cover relevant recordkeeping legislation, regulations and standards in their course content.

The process we have embarked on is not a rigid one. We are aware that there are many external developments which may have an impact on the ASA’s role in course accreditation and we are incorporating the feedback we receive with each individual accreditation into our deliberations about both policy and process. The relationship between the ASA and the educators and their institutions is a dynamic one, which I believe should be able to accommodate and does in fact display a degree of creative tension. I shall return to the question of the future of our current model of accreditation later.

Process — The Procedures

In addition to developing new criteria for accreditation, the Accreditation Committee was concerned to develop a workable set of procedures to support the process, recognising that our ability to manage a regular program of course accreditation rested largely on the voluntary efforts of individual ASA members. These procedures cover the whole process: from the decision to accredit the course/s of a particular university (this decision may be in response to a request from the university or in accordance with the Committee’s objective of covering all existing courses within a specified period) to the pre-visit preparation, visit and post-visit phases, including reporting to the university and to Council. In arriving at the procedures, we consulted previous accreditation panel members, former Education Committee members and current educators, chiefly through their informal representative body, the Recordkeeping Educators’ Forum. We provided draft procedures to Council for comment and we also studied the processes used by other professional associations. We contributed regular progress reports to the ASA Bulletin.

One of our aims was to minimise the pressure of the panel visit on the individual school or department. We were aware that preparing for these visits is very time-consuming for the academic staff involved and also strenuous for the panel members. And as we consider that the process should be evaluative rather than inspectorial in nature, we attempt to maximise use of the documentation provided by the university in the pre-visit phase. One crucial preparation task is mapping the course documentation supplied by the university against the competencies. Another is the selection of panel members. We allow for between three and five members per panel, where all must be professional members of the ASA and where one member should be a member of the Accreditation Committee. So far, one member of each panel has been an educator. This last provision was included as desirable because of strong representations from the educators themselves, but opinion from that quarter seems more divided now and it has in any case made selection of panel members more difficult. We try to include a graduate of an archives course other than that being accredited and a representative of the local industry. We also want panels to be representative of the ASA in terms of length and diversity of experience, so we sought expressions of interest by placing a notice in the ASA Bulletin.⁽⁷⁾

The procedures emphasise that the visit is focussed chiefly on determining whether the ASA’s criteria are being met. The panel members are required to be well acquainted with both the course documentation and the competencies before the visit, which is intended to elicit information not forthcoming through the written documentation alone. The visit provides for the panel to meet the academic staff and other university staff, including the Vice-Chancellor or their representative. It also provides the opportunity to meet current students and to view teaching facilities. One objective of the visits which has always been difficult to achieve is meeting past students and employers. Despite the efforts of the universities in organising convenient times and places for these meetings, they have often had poor responses.

The reporting phase begins with informal feedback to the university, and then proceeds with the panel producing a report to be considered by the Accreditation Committee. The report is then submitted to the institution for comment, which may accept the report, comment or decide to withdraw its request for recognition. The institution’s comments are then taken into account and the revised report is presented to the Accreditation Committee. If the report’s recommendation is that the course/s meet the ASA criteria, in other words, if it is agreed that the course/s should be recognised, then the report is submitted to Council for ratification and for notification in the next issue of the ASA Bulletin. If the report concludes that the course/s do not meet all the criteria, then the report goes first to the Council Executive for consideration: in other words, there is additional scrutiny within the ASA in these cases. In this situation, the ASA may offer provisional recognition over three years (in place of full recognition for five years) and give the university the opportunity to obtain full recognition in that time. The other alternative here is that the ASA will decide not to grant recognition at all.

The procedures allow for appeals against the decision to grant provisional recognition or not to grant recognition on the grounds of the misapplication of the criteria or departures from the Accreditation Committee’s guidelines. There is provision for a Review Committee, excluding both panel and current Accreditation Committee members, to investigate the appeal confidentially, and to report to Council’s Executive expeditiously. Reassessment is to be undertaken every five years, although the ASA reserves the right to reassess sooner if it believes the criteria are no longer being met or the course has been significantly restructured. The Accreditation Committee is charged with the responsibility of being a watchdog for its own procedures, each panel being required to submit a separate report on any shortcomings it identifies. The Committee will make minor adjustments as necessary during each round, being aware of the need to preserve equity of process between the various institutions being assessed.

Value — Issues Facing the ASA in Accreditation

As I indicated at the beginning of this paper, accreditation does not take place as something isolated from other ASA activities, nor can it continue without taking account of the external environment of vocational education and training and of university education in Australia today. It is difficult to judge the overall value of our current accreditation activities to all those affected by them, but it is possible to identify some of its contributions. Students and graduates benefit by knowing that the courses they take meet accepted standards, the universities benefit by maintaining their links with industry (and by publicising their accredited status in their recruitment literature), and the ASA benefits by affirming one of its stated responsibilities and thus meeting the expectations of its members. In our accreditation efforts, we have established an ongoing involvement in defining and maintaining standards of recordkeeping education. But there are other issues which I also see as crucial for our future involvement in this area.

The first is: do we become part of the edifice of nationally recognised non-university education for recordkeeping by seeking to become a Registered Training Organisation to assess training packages delivered by public and private providers under the Australian Qualifications Framework? We already have a stake in this edifice through our involvement in the records and archives competency standards. These are now due to be reviewed, as are all other existing competencies covered by the Business Services Industry Training Advisory Body. To some of you this may seem somewhat remote from the previous discussion of our current accreditation activities, but I assure it is not. This issue is closely linked to the next: what is the future of university courses in recordkeeping, given that post-graduate courses are now almost exclusively full fee courses. This means that students have to pay several thousand dollars to enrol in postgraduate diploma and coursework masters courses. This is a very serious question for our future as a profession. Will our future recruits come only from those who can afford such huge outlays and from those whose employers generously sponsor their studies? Or will we look to vocational education through other providers to educate future recordkeepers?

The next group of issues relates to the current state of university education in Australia. There is the problem of the regulation and quality of postgraduate coursework programs, used in many instances by universities to raise funds to make good their decreasing levels of public funds, a worrying trend which has been highlighted recently by the national body representing postgraduate students.⁽⁸⁾ Another issue which the Accreditation Committee has not yet faced is whether we should accredit graduate certificate courses. These courses are also full-fee paying courses, of much shorter duration and lighter in content than postgraduate diplomas, traditionally offered as opportunities for practitioners without degrees to gain a professional qualification. And then there is undergraduate education: we are already accrediting undergraduate courses, but it is difficult to see how they will flourish in these times of uncertainty and cutbacks in teaching staff and other resources across Australian universities. Finally, we need to remember that education is not completed at the point the graduate enters the profession. The ASA’s ability to offer continuing education programs has always been limited. Unless it enters partnerships with other professional associations, the universities and reputable private providers to offer affordable professional development programs so that those employed outside the major archival institutions have access to post-qualification training and development, the ASA’s lack of participation here will weaken its claim to fulfilling its objective of maintaining educational standards. I do not think we should adopt the path of the Academy of Certified Archivists;⁽⁹⁾ we should be striving to support and extend the diversity of offerings we have now.

I would like to conclude by urging all of you to consider these issues, to debate them with your colleagues and to participate in a concerted, ongoing discussion on how best the ASA can contribute to education for recordkeeping now and in the future.

Footnotes

(1) The Accreditation Committee is a committee of Council. Council appoints one of its members as Council Representative on the Committee to ensure effective communication between the two bodies. In earlier years, the Accreditation Committee was a sub-committee of the Education Committee. The latter has now been reconstituted as the Professional Development Committee, whose responsibilities include continuing education, competencies and providing advice on the definition of professional membership. The Professional Development Committee’s recent paper entitled “Professional development for archivists — a discussion paper” (July 1999) deals at length with the issue of conditions for professional membership. Comments on this issue can be forwarded to Michael Piggott, Convenor, ASA Professional Development Committee, University of Melbourne, Parkville VIC 3052 or by email m.piggott@lib.unimelb.edu.au

(2) See objectives of the Australian Society of Archivists at http://www.archivists.org.au/aboutasa.html#objectives

(3) The Committee held its first meeting in May 1997. Its current members are Sigrid McCausland (Convenor), Colleen McEwen (Secretary), Jill Caldwell, Mark Stevens, Karin Brennan, Angie Rizakos and Kathryn Dan (Council Representative). Susan Kennedy was a member from May 1997 to October 1998 and Steve Stuckey was briefly Council Representative. I would like to thank all the other members of the Committee for their work, in particular Colleen McEwen and Jill Caldwell for their work on the competencies and for their continuing assiduous monitoring of the accreditation process and related issues. Barbara van Bronswijk will be Council Representative in Kathryn Dan’s place after the changeover in Council membership at this Conference.

(4) You can find the Criteria and Procedures on the ASA website at http://www.archivists.org.au/council/accreditationcriteria.html and http://www.archivists.org.au.council/accreditationprocedures.html respectively.

(5) A person who has a degree from a recognised university, but does not have an archives qualification may become a professional member after two years’ experience in a “recognised archival institution” (see ASA Rules 4 (2) (ii) ).

(6) The competencies and the introduction of the training package approach to delivery of vocational education and training deserve serious consideration within the ASA. As a professional association, we need to be aware of their likely impact on future education in the recordkeeping field.

(7) ASA Bulletin, April 1998, p.22.

(8) “Postgraduate ‘cash cows’”, The Australian, 5 May 1999, p.35.

(9) See http://www.certifiedarchivists.org for an introduction to the certification system in the United States.