Dodos in the archives: rebranding the archival profession to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century within ESARBICA

Never before has the archival profession been challenged on so many fronts, especially in the developing world. The profession is at crossroads simply because the transformation from custodial to post-custodial phase has remained a fallacy and our perception remains sentimentally rooted to traditional archival practice which leaves little room for inventiveness and the distillation of ideas consonant with contemporary archival practice. The thesis of this paper is based on the argument that the records managers and archivists of the future will be recruited from schools of information technology (IT) and communications in view of the fact that our operational foundations and modalities cannot be transformed so long as we bury our heads in the sand like the proverbial ostrich, oblivious to the fact that the archival landscape is transforming. The fact that we have lost the language ‘battle’ to the IT world is a harbinger of worse things to come so long as that conservatism persists. This paper, based on experience as a practitioner and academic, examines the core skills of the archival profession by illuminating how they have changed, if at all, from a developing world perspective by focusing on the archival education offered in the region covered by the Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives (ESARBICA). This paper focuses on the instructor and the product (graduate students and practitioners) as it is the argument of this paper that both need to acquire new skills and change priorities to guarantee survival in this digital age. A plethora of issues will be discussed here inter alia; the archival curriculum being offered in Library and Information Science schools in the ESARBICA region, how the organizational culture is acting as an impediment to transformation, the need for skills across the broad spectrum of library, archives and museology fields to remain professionally competent, and how the onset of digital technologies can empower archivists and records managers to adjust to the changing environments of custody, access, technology and the web. To survive beyond 2015, archivists and records managers in the developing world need an introspection to facilitate transformation so as to be able to remain professionally relevant in this information society.