PhD (University of Turku) Jari Lybeck (b. 1958) has social history as his speciality. He is completing his doctoral thesis (University of Turku) on the social history of the seamen of Rauma from the 1840s to the 1870s, a period when Rauma, a town on the Western coast of Finland, expanded its maritime activity to an astonishing degree.
Jari Lybeck has worked in the Finnish National Archives Service since 1987. Since 2009 he has been employed by the National Archives as Senior Adviser.
The theme of Jari Lybeck’s research for a scientific article (to be completed in 2015) is: Birth and Development of Records Management Thinking in Finland.
In many archival traditions archives and records management are more or less separate domains. In the Nordic and partly in Latin traditions these domains are closely related or completely overlapping. No theoretical distinction is made between records and archives. This is true in the ideal world, in reality there are variations.
Records management was ‘invented’ in the United States in the 1940s but great variations exist as regards its relationship with archives and archives management. In Germany records and archives management are distinctly separate. Records as such are never archives in Germany. Only records that have been arranged and have permanent retention value are regarded as archives. When the situation is such, it is understandable that records and archives managers represent different professions in Germany.
Finland is a good example of the integrated view on records and archives, and consequently, on records and archives management The view received a legal confirmation in the Archives Act of 1981. There are however, signs of records management thinking already much earlier in the Finnish archives tradi-tion. The purpose of Jari Lybeck’s research is to study the origins of this thinking and the justification that was given to the view which favoured the unification of records and archives management.
The initial assumption was that already in the 1880s there were certain records management features in the activities of the National Archives but this is perhaps overinterpreting the sources to some degree. In any case the development was in full swing right after the second world war and the question remains: what particular circumstances in Finland favoured the integration of records and archives management approach which was quite rare in other countries.