Imagine the Daguerreian Society, those quirky gents and dames dedicated to the world’s first practical system of photography, trading in their prints whole-sale for digital cameras. Or, better yet, imagine the National Rifle Association pawning off their guns. Ludicrous, you say? Well, what can only be described as the biggest blunder of all time for the organization, the Society of American Archivists (SAA) have allowed their long-lost brothers-in-arms turned arch-nemeses, Records Managers that is, to befuddle them into actions similar in vein to the afore-mentioned scenarios. Just two weeks ago, Marilyn Bier, the Executive Director of The Authority on Records Information Management (ARMA International), conned the President, Elizabeth W Adkins, and Vice Preseident, Mark A. Greene, of SAA into destroying the archives of the Archives and Archivists listserv.
Wha…Wha…WHAT!, you exclaim? Archivists dumping their archives? Well, it’s true. Archiwhat? has learned that after a night-long bender, Bier convinced Adkins and Greene into taking ARMA’s much talked about online assessment to determine whether one’s records management program is an asset or potential liability. Adkins and Greene’s answers about the archives of the listserv apparently scared them enough to not only take the archives of the listserv offline, but to destroy them permanently, much to the malign of the professional archival community.
