A Decade of Development: Educational Programs for Automated Records and Techniques Within the Society of American Archivists

During the 1980s, the Society of American Archivists (SAA) task force and then committee concerned with automation organized a series of seminars and workshops. In doing so, the members evolved a series of curricula based on explicit learning objectives. When they tried to use these curricula to structure the course contents, the idealism of the curricula gave way to reality. This article reviews the development of the curricula and their implementation. It examines the successes and failures of earlier efforts and concludes with lessons to be drawn from these early attempts to train archivists to deal with automation.