READING, RITING, AND RITHMETIC - SPECULATIONS ON CHANGE IN RESEARCH PROCESSES

The skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic have evolved distinctly and negatively during this century. These changes have already begun to affect archivists and archival institutions. The need for what arch ives contain will remain, but the ability of many people to use archiv es effectively may be expected to diminish. Unless archivists are will ing to move away from serving the whole population in a postliterate s ociety, they will have to mediate between the users' needs and the doc uments' contents to a greater degree than they have in the past.