Ministry Competition 2022, archivists: 'after almost two years we don't know our evaluation'

We receive and publish an open letter from a representative of successful candidates in the competition for 268 archivist officers, launched in 2022 by the Ministry of Culture, who one year after the conclusion of the oral tests still do not know the outcome of their examination. The result? The Archives have large staffing gaps, and in the run-up to the publication of the rankings, many of the successful candidates have not accepted fixed-term positions. However, the time elapsed is too long. Below is the text.

We are a representative of the successful candidates in the competition for 268 archivist officers, announced on November 8, 2022 by RIPAM, a procedure that was part of a larger selection process that included the hiring of 518 technical officers in total. Today, two years after the call for applications, we find ourselves living through a surreal affair, which becomes even more unbelievable if we consider the similarity with that experienced by colleagues participating in the competition announced in 2016. [...]

In the archival institutes where many of us work as consultants, or with VAT number or as employees (officials or administrative, technical and fruition assistants) we often find ourselves performing useful functions to make up for the total absence of technical officials and allow their institutional functioning: as is well known, in fact, State Archives and Superintendencies are close to collapse due to the shortage of technical staff, so much so that they are often directed by young officials of other profiles, lacking specific training, who have responded to appeals from the General Directorate of Archives. Suffice it to think, by way of example, of some regions where many archival institutes lack archivists and are directed by archaeological officers, restoration officers or administrative officers, often seconded for the occasion, and where archival and enhancement work is carried out mainly by assistants and external collaborators.

Lacking for decades the opportunity for competitions for outsiders or vertical progressions for internal MIC staff, all of us, thanks to possessing the qualifications required by the announcement and the skills acquired through years of work at the archives, have taken the opportunity for professional growth or job stabilization. Being the most numerous in terms of recruitment, we were the first to take the written tests on May 22 and among the first to start with the oral tests on September 4, 2023. At the end of them on Dec. 18, 340 of us were found to be eligible. But despite the fact that it has been between 10 and 13 months since the oral tests were held, at present, none of us knows our evaluation at the orals, let alone our position on the ranking list, since there is none!

These days, about 170 future restoration officers and librarians of the MIC are being asked to choose locations. From July to date, about 700 new technical officers including archaeologists, architects, art historians, demoethnoanthropologists and paleontologists have taken office, compared to the 250 hires foreseen in the announcement (and later expanded) for those technical profiles. In fact, the MIC was authorized to add another 700 units to the 518 initially planned and in fact used almost all the available resources. Only those planned for archivists are missing, the ranking list of which would seem never to have been transmitted by RIPAM itself to FORMEZ and MIC, although on September 19 the administration announced its publication by early October because it was finally endorsed on September 12. And while in 2018 the justification for the suspension of the ranking list was an appeal to the Regional Administrative Court, today, according to reports from various sources, the delays are to be blamed on contestants lacking the entry qualifications stipulated in the announcement, which makes such a long wait unjustifiable, given that the selection board was supposed to have finished its work as late as spring. In recent months, there have been written communiqués from ANAI, Associazione Nazionale Archivistica Italiana, CICOM, Comitato Idonei Concorso MIC, and requests from the unions to the ministry, but for us, too, today, as in 2018, there is only the passing back of responsibility from MIC to the RIPAM Interministerial Commission.

While the latter continues to waste time and the ministry-which has lavishly paid for the provision of a competition procedure that was absolutely necessary to avoid the closure of many institutes-gives us time deadlines that are regularly disregarded, archival institutes languish without adequately trained technical staff, and 340 competitors with their families have been living a suspended life, including professionally, for more than a year. Because while waiting for the imminent publication, repeatedly announced, of their rankings, many precarious or VAT-registered colleagues have not signed contracts to avoid leaving a job half-finished, others have given up fixed-term contracts, and employees in the State Archives have remained and remain outside of projects, including fund rearrangement projects, that presuppose continuity because of the unknown of their future presence in the workforce.

And that is precisely why we today with this open letter demand CLARITY! Despite the fact that our category is, together with that of librarians, in greater distress than the others due to a chronic shortage in the staff and very few positions put up for competition in past years, we have seen about 700 colleagues from the other professional profiles hired quickly even with rankings similar in number or even larger than ours: and we are not just talking about the winners, but also about hundreds of eligible candidates whose qualifications have been checked, far more numerous than ours! Therefore, considering that these waiting times are now unjustifiable, we demand the PUBLICATION OF THE GRADUATION OF ARCHIVIST OFFICIALS and THE UNBLOCKING OF OUR HIRING. In fact, let us remember that behind the 340 alphanumeric codes identifying the eligible there are people, lives and families who have been waiting for ANSWERS even for more than a year!

Ministry Competition 2022, archivists: 'after almost two years we don't know our evaluation'

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