Right about now, as Jim Gibb deftly demonstrated on ARCH-L, there are some
offended archaeologists out there. Jim wrote that the survey I distributed
yesterday implied "wrong doing on the part of lots of hard working,
committed, and woefully underpaid professionals." In a way, he's right:
There is "wrong doing" in the CRM industry and not everyone is responsible.
That's one reason SOPA and its successor, ROPA, were created for
archaeologists. We all recognize that there are those in the CRM industry
who will break laws and violate codes of ethics, but there are no data to
illustrate the degree and distribution of the "wrong doing." As one
colleague suggested, it's something best left for gossip sessions at
professional meetings.
 
Whistle blowing doesn't work in CRM because there is no substantive, unified
and coherent way to, as one respondent wrote, "self-police" the system. The
reasons for this are many: multiple disciplines within the industry and
protectionist attitudes by some professional organizations (keep the laws
intact and the cash cow flowing) are just two. I wanted to find a suite of
tools to identify precisely how the system is broken. A couple of months ago
Sarah Neusius, president of the Pennsylvania Archaeological Council,
challenged me to find a means leading "to a real discussion of what should
be done to remedy errors in professional practice." The first step towards
that end is collecting data. The survey represents one source of that data;
other sources include industry newsletter reports, press reports and legal
cases.
 
No survey is perfect.  The "right" people don't respond, the "right"
questions aren't asked, etc. I did not set out to find out how CRM firms
please their clients and save the resources; the literature and media are
full of self-congratulatory tales from within the industry. I wanted to put
some quantitative and qualitative strength behind observations I and others
have repeatedly made about the industry. Discrete, individual examples of
what Jim Gibb described as "wrong doing" clearly do not carry any weight in
changing policy or the industry. Perhaps some numbers and other data may do
the trick.
 
David Rotenstein
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David S. Rotenstein, Ph.D., RPA
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
WWW: http://www.city-net.com/~davidsr/crm.htm
E-Mail: [log in to unmask]
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