Vol. 21, No. 2 Fall 1999

Jonathan Jeffrey Editor

NFACE Examines Continuing Education Needs

The Council of State Historical Records Coordinators is pleased to announce a new project to examine the continuing education needs of the nation's historical records keepers and develop an action agenda to address those needs.

The National Forum on Archival Continuing Education (NFACE) is a project developed by the Council of State Historical Records Coordinators (COSHRC) in partnership with the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH). The project's development is being funded through a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC)

The Goals for the project are to:

• Gather and disseminate information about what continuing educational services and information resources are already available for those who care for historical records.
• Encourage collaboration and coordination among providers of archival continuing education in developing additional offerings, especially those that address gaps in existing educational opportunities.
• Improve the accessibility to information resources about best practices in the care of historical records that support these education efforts.
• Develop an action agenda for archival continuing education in the next decade. This agenda will be shared with federal funding agencies, resource allocators, and key stakeholders in archival continuing education.

NFACE is concerned with the continuing educational and informational needs of all individuals who care for historical records. The 1998 COSHRC report, "Where History Begins," which analyzed a survey of historical records repositories in the U.S., found records in the care of three broad categories of individuals:

• Professional archivists and manuscript curators. Professional records keepers work in a variety of repositories, including college and university archives and special collections departments, historical societies, state and local government archives, federal repositories like the National Archives and Library of Congress, research libraries and other cultural institutions, and corporate archives serving businesses and religious organizations, among others.
• Allied professionals with records responsibilities. These include local government officials, museum curators, librarians, historic site administrators, and others whose primary training and expertise is in another field but whose work involves some significant records-related responsibilities.
• Records caretakers who have limited or no training. Many organizations, including local historical societies and other community-based organizations, depend heavily on volunteers, student interns, or paraprofessionals to provide vital care for their historical collections.

The complete text of "Where History Begins" is available via the COSHRC and NHPRC web sites. See:
http://www.coshrc.org/surveys/HRRS/hrrsdocs.html

The National Forum on Archival Continuing Education will be held April 27-29, 2000, in Decatur, Georgia, just outside Atlanta with more than 100 invited participants. They will represent more than 45 national and regional organizations and many state-level bodies that currently provide funding for archival continuing education or that sponsor such programs.

In the months leading up to the Forum, the NFACE staff and Program Committee will undertake an in-depth data gathering and evaluation process. We are starting now to contact national and regional professional associations, state and federal agencies, individual repositories, and other organizations. We are seeking their involvement and will use information that they provide to compile a master directory of all current educational opportunities.