Returning home after my MA at University College London, I felt confident about professional theory. However I desperately needed hands-on experience to make things settle down in my mind. I could see my students needed the same too. So I started looking for a place to do some practical work both for me and for my students but nobody wanted strangers to see and fiddle around with their current records.
The solution came from the closest: Our own Faculty. I knew the Office of Student Affairs had trouble in processing a big backlog of student records. I offered them help and they happily agreed. They did not mind the students seeing their records because our students were in their first year and the records they were to process did not relate to them in anyway.
The following year we needed to practise on records centre processes but there was none in sight. So we had to suffice with doing a records survey and preparing the retention schedule for our Faculty. Practical training material for the first year students, on the other hand, was presenting a problem again because we had already arranged what we could readily find. The solution came by itself: The director of the Sultanahmet Commercial High School nearby had asked for help from a friend working at the University in arranging their backlog of student records dating from a century ago. Thus we found material that would suffice at least for a few years and a perfect example of what would happen if records were not taken care of properly.
Having our own Faculty as the example and knowing how to approach people by then, we tried our chances at other offices of the University this time and it worked. So we started doing a big records survey at the central offices of the University and preparing their retention schedules.
The following years, it was the turn of other Faculties. So we finished all offices one by one. In the meantime I had offered the University administration to setup a records centre. This would solve a great deal of their problems relating to records and give our students a continuous means of getting hands-on experience in the years to come. The Deputy Rector of the time had agreed to the idea and ordered for what was necessary to be done but some corrupt bureaucrat at lower levels, who had a personal financial interest in keeping things as they are, managed to first postpone and later to obstruct the whole project despite orders coming from the highest level. I did not want to get involved with this fight so I left things at that.
The opportunity came from another source this time: Darulaceze, a pious foundation for the care of the poor. They had asked the University for help in guiding them on how to process their passive records. So, we arranged their records, having the all-time-best example in showing the importance of keeping storerooms clean—the records were covered with a two-inch thick layer of dust and this is no exaggeration. Using masks, gloves and overalls for personal protection and vacuum cleaners for removing the dust were a must. While we were there, we had a chance to do a records survey, too.
The following year we had started a post-graduate program. Just then a colleague brought the news that Uskudar Local Council had asked for help for their records and was ready to pay a certain amount financially in return. This was an opportunity we could not have missed because it meant we could setup the computer laboratory of the Department we had been longing for. Were it with undergraduates I would not dare to take on a commercial project but with post-graduates theory, at least, was not a problem. The students were very cooperative with the whole thing because they knew what it was like not to have enough computers they could use during their study. On the other hand, they were unconfident they could take on a records management job on their own because they felt they did not have enough experience. This was an opportunity they did not want to miss either. Seeing everybody was happy with the idea, we moved the whole course program to the site and built the whole course content around hands-on experience. It was the best training we ever gave because we had a chance to cover the whole life-cycle in a living example: Development of a subject classification system for general correspondence, records survey, retention schedules, arrangement of passive records, preparation of finding aids and storeroom design. The students enjoy the best paying records management jobs in the top companies in this country now.
The majority of the projects I have run for the private sector are archival rather than records managerial. However there are two examples of this kind too.
The first one was at Tes Bilgisayar Hizmetleri A. S. where I developed an index thesaurus for the computer documentation of the systems the company was selling and wrote a procedures manual for records keeping.
The second one was at Koc Holding A. S. where I developed a subject classification system for general correspondence.
All this contributed to my attaining "Registered Archivist and Records Manager" status with the Society of Archivists (UK).
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