Without a doubt, promises of high pay and generous fringe benefits do not lure most archivists to the profession. Why then do we become archivists? In view of the great diversity within the profession, evidently it is not because of any particular external characteristics or interests that we share. Instead, three core attitudes shape the professional life of archivists and draw us to this profession. These are a commitment to service, an ability to search for evidence and meaning in the documentary record, and a rich appreciation of the passing human scene.

Archival traditions and practices, together with each archivist's particular situation, not only vary greatly around the world, but within countries and types of institutions within those countries as well. These diverse traditions provide only a limited basis for shared identities between archivists, but they are ultimately linked by the common practice of each archivist of adapting universal archival principles to fit his or her institution's own circumstances. The International Council on Archives provides a forum to encourage international cooperation among archivists and opportunities for those in similar institutions and regions to strengthen their common identities and associations with each other, and to share their approaches to common issues and goals. Several factors account for the advancement of the ICA's goals and for the limitation of its achievements as well. Overall, however, underlying both the similar and diverse ways of dealing with archival issues is the role of archives to provide evidence of the cultural context of societies. The solutions to the challenges facing archivists today should not divide us along theoretical lines, but strive to enable all archivists to work together in fulfilling this cultural role.

The French Revolution has been widely regarded as a turning point in archival history, yet few have probed the complexity and numerous contradictions of this transitional period. Rather than smoothly ushering in a new concept of archives or archival practice, the Revolution fostered two divergent tendencies. Records and documents from the Old Régime were reviled and frequently destroyed, even as archival structures were developed to care for new records of the Republic, and for selected records from the past. This article explores both of these tendencies in order to provide a fuller picture of archival development during the Revolutionary period. Yet the very fervor surrounding archives during that time also provides the basis for more universal reflection. The battle over the appropriate formation and content of archives demonstrates the extent to which they are, above all, cultural institutions, and the ways in which archival documents are frequently of importance as much for their symbolism as for their content. This article concludes by examining the ways in which archives, as "sites of memory," are very much products of their time, invested with a meaning that may be changed--as during the French Revolution--by changing beliefs and values.

The Political Commercial Archive is part of the University of Oklahoma's Political Communication Center. It is the largest and most comprehensive repository of its kind in the world. In this paper, the authors report the results of a project designed to manage more than 55,000 film, audio, and video recordings. Fields in the local database that provide access for item-level records are detailed, and the organization of the collection-level records for the MARC AMC format is noted. Also discussed are special problems related to preparing these items for scholarly use by individual researchers, universities, museums, and media professionals.

This article addresses the many challenges the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL), the nation's oldest scientific laboratory, faces in maintaining its records. One of the most serious problems is the number of archival repositories which collect LBL records. The author discusses what the implications are for LBL and the archival profession in having institutional records alienated, and what safeguards are in place to protect the identification and integrity of federal records, but how those safeguards fall short of the objective in actual practice. Lastly, this article discusses one possible model for LBL to work with other archival repositories, as they build special collections which include federal records of post-World War II science.

This extended think-piece begins by exploring the late twentieth-century philosophical trend of postmodernism, and what its fragmented, decontextualized world-view means for archives. Such a position, as taken up by some historians, posits the absence of coherence, the death of grand historical narratives, and the supremacy of relativity. Consideration of the postmodern serves as a jumping-off point for an exploration of the nature of records, and the mission of the archival profession to furnish an understanding of the documentary evidence of past societies. The discussion leads full circle to situating archivists within their own (postmodern) society and explores how current trends in appraisal and description reflect present societal concerns. Ultimately, the article concludes that there is room for archives and archivists in the postmodern world, and that archivists, with their unique perspective on reading/deconstructing the documentary traces of society, are ideally suited to make sense of it.