Safely home in Firdos Square, Baghdad.

Our last Digital Preservation Training Programme (DPTP) was attended by many people from the UK and abroad.  Thanks to the British Institute for the Study of Iraq and the British Council in Iraq among the attendees were two colleagues from the Iraq National Library and Archives in Baghdad (INLA).  The INLA was destroyed during and post the 2003 invasion and conflict in Iraq.

In April of 2003, the National Library and Archives (Dar al-Kutub wa al-Watha’Iq) of Iraq, which was located directly across from the Ministry of Defense, was burned and looted. The burning and looting appeared to have taken place on two occasions: April 10 and April 12-13. These fires were set professionally with accelerants. A report was later given by Saad Eskander, the director–general of the National Library and Archive, regarding the destruction. He noted that three days before the invasion, library staff were told to destroy all archival material related to the Ba’athist rule. Eskander also reported that the destruction was performed by “a mix of poor people looking for a quick profit, along with regime loyalists intent on destroying evidence of atrocities”.

In total, an estimated 60 percent of its total archival materials, 25 percent of its books, newspapers, rare books, and most of its historical photographs and maps were destroyed.

Before the destruction, the library and archives were reported to have held 417,000 books, 2,618 periodicals dating from the late Ottoman era to modern times, and a collection of 4,412 rare books and manuscripts. According to Eskander, Saddam loyalists burned the entirety of the Republican Archive, which contained the records of the Ba’athist regime between the years 1958 and 1979. Also completely destroyed were the Ba’athist court proceedings detailing the charges against and trials of party opponents. Records of Iraq’s relations with its neighbors, including Iran, Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, are missing. Iraq has accused neighbouring countries of stealing sections of its national archives. In addition to these documents, which would have been of great interest to Iraqi citizens as well as to historians, the INLA lost records and documents from the Ottoman reign, the British occupation, the monarchical era, and much more. The destruction or loss of these materials, according to Eskander, did not occur only during the April 2003 attacks.

Saad Eskander, director of the library and archives since 2003, kept a diary through the British Library’s website, with entries starting in November 2006. His entries document the events covering the library and archive’s restoration. By 2007, the center “had already become a safe haven for intellectual activity, fully accessible to the public, with a state-of-the-art computer center”. In addition, there is also a facility for transferring documents to microfilm, a cataloging operation, and a department that locates documents from Iraqi government ministries. Having been a major player in the history of Iraq, the British Library was able to help the reconstruction, by providing microfilm copies of rare books and microfiche copies of documents relating to the administration of Iraq from 1914 to 1921 that were held by the British in India. Despite the fact that five staff members have been killed, along with the library closing for days at a time due to heavy fighting, Eskander says he sees the institution as “an important source of uniting and unifying the country.”

Having been a major player in the history of Iraq, the British Library was able to help the reconstruction, by providing microfilm copies of rare books and microfiche copies of documents relating to the administration of Iraq from 1914 to 1921 that were held by the British in India. Despite the fact that five staff members have been killed, along with the library closing for days at a time due to heavy fighting, Eskander says he sees the institution as “an important source of uniting and unifying the country.”  The British Library is also digitizing important collections for the INLA. As a result, at  CILIP’s award ceremony in his honour, Dr Eskander articulated the need for training in relation to digital preservation and to ensure good management of these and other digital resources. The Digital Preservation Training Programme offered to find funding to enable some colleagues from the INLA to attend.

Waleed Al-Naqshabandi and Zahraa Al Lami both work in the INLA. Waleed’s father is a government scultor who made the iconic sculpture which was pulled down on the 9th of April 2003. His father still works as sculptor for the present government. waleed is a senior IT specialists at the INLA and came to the DPTP to learn more about the preservation of the many digital copies of documents which the INLA is gathering from aroudn the world to replenish its holdings. Both spent time at the British Library being shown various projects relating to digital preservation.  Waleed and Zahraa were very keen to emphasise their Iraq identity regardless of religion. Both have suffered during the post invasion aftermath. Waleed carried his old era Iraqi passport everywhere with him as a reminder of how bad things were under Sadaam Hussein’s regime.

I felt very humbled hearing about Waleed and Zahraa’s life in Baghdad. While we all hear about how dangerous life can be in Baghdad, it was plain to see how much they both love their city and their country.  I learned a lot, not just about life in Baghdad but how to get visas fastracked from Jordan to Baghdad, the kindness of the British Council’s Iraq based team but also where to get some fine Iraqi food in London and of course I learnt some Arabic!

Both have been letting me know how they are proceeding at the INLA since their return and I hope to maintain my connection with the INLA and continue this programme.

Zahraa, a very good student!

Waleed hard at work at the DPTP

The magic bullet holes the French made in Alicante

Well, as many of us know it doesn’t exist! This was part of my opening speech for the XV Jornadas de la Conferencia de Archiveros de las Universidades Españolas. This is the annual meeting of all Spanish university archivists. I spoke about “El perfil del archivero en el entorno digital”, or “the profile of the archivist in the digital world”. Most universities in Spain have an archivist, who also performs the role of records manager. Records manager as a profession doesn’t exist in Spain. Repositories existed in almost all universities but were on the whole in the libraries and not within the archives. There is a big divide between librarians and archivists in Spain also so not a great deal of exchange goes on between these sectors. Many questions concerned costs as well as approaches to preservation. An excellent book has been written in Spanish about digital preservation by Jordi Serra of the University of Barcelona, “Gestión de los documentos digitales: estrategias para su conservación” =” Electronic records management: strategies for long term preservation”.

A lot of discussion revolved around the struggle to convince the superiors in the organization of the importance of digial preservation; a lot of discussion about how access drives so much of what is going on, also the big problem of engaging our techy friends in the area of digital preservation and making them aware of the issue. The biggest universities such as Complutense and UNED (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia.) were of course represented. UNED is the UK equivalent of the Open University with braches all over the world and is based in Madrid. A lot of discussion also took place about the involvement of non-anglo saxon countries in international fora such as ISO panels and ICA. While all these endeavours are important a certain amount of frustration is evident in relation to decision making and power!

Much talk and walking through the historical centre of Alicante, and in the interests of professional scholarship and in keeping with traditional Spanish culture I stayed awake until 3am catching the plane home the next day to rainy London.

On December 8th I was invited by Dr Saad Eskander, the Director of the National Library and Archives of Iraq, as his guest to an awards ceremony he was having at the British Library.

The story behind this is that in 2006 I met him in Abu Dhabi speaking about his work and I subsequently asked him to write a blog for our community of archivists and librarians about his day to day life. This blog was picked up by almost all main stream press around the world. Here is an article about him in the International Herald Tribune. In an interview with Fran Monks (in her website on How to make a difference ) Saad spoke about how through his own free will he decided to return to his home city of Baghdad in 2003 after 23 years of absence, of which 13 had been spent as an academic in the UK. After Sadaam had been removed, Saad and a group of Iraqi artists, writers and academics from the UK returned to their country to see what they could do. All of the group except for Saad returned to London almost immediately because they were so shocked by the security situation. Saad alone was prepared to risk his life in order to assist with the rebuilding of the nation that he loves. Saad believes that the future of Iraq and Baghdad must be non-sectarian and democratic and have equal rights for all citizens, including women. This he practises in the Library which he has restored. Saad described his shock on first seeing the library: “95% of the contents had been either destroyed or looted. Everything had been burnt and even the marble had melted. Everything was covered in soot and the stench was almost unbearable.”

At the dinner after the ceremony were many of the great and the good from UK with specialities in the Middle East. I was an incongruous figure among them…as this obviously does not include me…I also sat beside Ann Clwyd who is a Welsh MP and Gordon Browns’ special envoy on Human Rights in Iraq. A lot of interest in the digital preservation training we do here and also the potential of VLEs being developed to facilitate learning in this area. It is seen as priority for the INLA to learn about how to manage their digital surrogates as their collections of archives is largely made up of these surrogates from the British Library as well as other places.

I just spotted a posting from a fellow Antipodean, made to the Australian Archivists (aus-archivists) listserv, which has certainly raised some interesting questions surrounding web 2.0 technologies and their impact on the Archive sector…. Perhaps a debate well worth monitoring, and further exploring here, within the realm of web 2.0 itself?

See Australian Archivists listserv posting below:

Archival institutions are increasingly using social networking sites, tagging (folksonomies), blogs, wikis, and Flickr to promote their collections. Does anyone know any studies evaluating this phenomenon in the archival setting? I don’t mean the this-is-how-we-did-it, isn’t-it-exciting or look-how-many-hits-we’re-getting articles. I mean thoughtful consideration of the value of these tools and the effects they are having on our work. I’d also love some discussion on the list.

Why we have decided to use these tools? What benefits have they brought? What kind of new audiences are they attracting? How long do these audiences stick around? Is the resource taken to sustain these ‘relationships’ worth it? Do these audiences engage with us beyond the social network stuff? Do they use our databases? come in and use our collections? order quality copies? Does it matter if they don’t? How is our adoption of these tools affecting what material we choose to process and promote? With user-generated content and tagging are our formal documentation skills, cataloguing standards, thesauri, etc passé? Does mashing trivialise our research collections? Any observations or leads to articles welcome. [ Helen Yoxall, Archives Manager, Registration and Collection Management, Powerhouse Museum, PO Box K346, Haymarket NSW 1238, Australia, URL: www.powerhousemuseum.com/archives/index.asp]“

After a quick (and rudimentary) search, I stumbled across a few sources that may be of interest:

• UKOLN have a presentation “Web 2.0: Implications For The Cultural Heritage Sector”
• The Archives & Museum Informatics Museums and the Web website, includes a paper “Towards Community Contribution: Empowering Community Voices On-Line” (Angèle Alain, Library and Archives Canada, Canada; Michelle Foggett, The National Archives of England and Wales, UK). It refers to Web 2.0 and community involvement in museums, libraries and archives e.g. the Moving Here project which has sought to “break down barriers to the direct involvement of minority ethnic groups in sharing their history on-line” and is among other projects keen to “embrace social networking in future to give users a higher profile voice to enable their knowledge to be passed down to the next generation”. (However, “specialised and appropriate training” was identified as crucial to tackling the barriers,[such as the 'digital divide' itself]). On the related MuseumsComputerGroup website is the article abstract “Museums and Web 2.0: Connections + Community” (by Jennifer Trant, Archives and Museum Informatics), noting both the possibilities, and challenges, surrounding the adoption of web 2.0.
• Also of interest are the web 2.0 blogs: Library 2.0 network, Library 2.0 gang, Museum 2.0; and while I couldn’t spot an Archives 2.0-specific blog anywhere, there was an interesting posting on the Archives Hub blog and on ArchivesNext (which, as one of its aims, invites bloggers to explore “Web 2.0 applications and discussing their applicability to archival institutions”).
• Our own dablog has highlighted one dimension of the web 2.0 impact (inspired by UCL’s Dr Andrew Flinn) i.e. in relation to urgent calls to preserve the heritage outputs of web 2.0, due to “the transient history of the increasing number of minority/dissenting voices, whose heritage is only documented via websites, blogs, wikis and social software”.
• In true folksonomic Web 2.0 style, we can also see what’s been tagged as Archives2.0 in del.icio.us.

Know of any other sources that discuss the impact of Web 2.0 on the Archives Sector? Or would you like to share your opinions in response to the questions posed by Helen Yoxall (above)?

So back from the ICA annual Congress held in Kuala Lumpur. So many things to tell you about.

The local press picked up on the event and it seemed to be stirring up a few stories… The Malaysian government had just renewed its search for evidence to stake its claim to Pedra Branca, just over a week after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) awarded the island to Singapore. Foreign Minister Rais Yatim said he has directed his officials to try again to trace a letter written by British governor William Butterworth to the Temenggong and Sultan of Johor, seeking permission to build Horsburgh Lighthouse on the island. This all neatly coinicided with the conference. Don’t know if it worked but all very interesting and shows how political archives/records can be.

Anyway back to the sessions, so many! I will just go through 2-3 of them as I don’t have so much space so no offence to thse I don’t cover. I was very impressed by the session by the Municipal archives of Rotterdam describing their E-depot program. It outlined how the Rotterdam Municipal Archives implemented this process, how it was financed, what lessons have been learned along the way, and what plans have been put in place for the next few years. It also studied the impact that such a program has on its stakeholders and the importance of a good change-management process. The workshop format was also very good!

I only got a brief bit of Interpares 3 but it was very interesting. I caught Liz McEvoy (talking about an Irish example with aplomb) and Luciana Duranti talking about the research conducted on e-government records systems that do not respect accountability requirements, and how they can be modified to do so. Also about systems that do respect these requirements while the records are active, but do not allow for the long term authentic preservation of such records and should be redesigned to address such issue; and then about systems that do, and are good examples to be followed.

A group facilitated by George McKenzie of National Archives of Scotland and Robert Buckley of Xerox of met to discuss technology watch and the ICA. It is a group which will hopefully be looking at how to prioritise projects in the digital arena as well as how to best communicate information to all the many members of ICA around the world. Looking at a list of themes and identifying expertise worldwide was discussed. One project proposed is to look at standardising the gathering of statistics around the world. The group will be in touch through a mailing group, so watch this space. ICA are showing a lot of interest in working with freeware and one of their projects was the web-based archival description software that is based on International Council on Archives (ICA) standards. ICA AtoM is free, open-source software. It is multi-lingual and supports multi-repository collections. “AtoM” is an acronym for “Access to Memory”. More information about the software features can be found in the ICA AtoM online user manual: http://ica-atom.org/docs.

Another session was that on the protection of cultural property in armed conflict presided by Dr. Jussi Nuorteva, Director General of the National Archives Service of Finland and Joan Van Albada, Secretary General of ICA. Dr Nuoteva reminised on his (pre-Iraq-war2) new year’s eve spent in Iraq as he was inspecting sites of cultural importance in Iraq on behalf of Unesco prior to the war. The Blue Shield was discussed – this is essentially the Red Cross of cultural property. It is a symbol which give protection during times of war. Military should be aware of its existence and sites should be marked as being Blue Shield sites and by law are protected from attack during times of conflict and unrest. We had some real military footage of a fighter plane identifying a military base but seeing a small ziggurat alongside with the blue shield mark on top did not strike. It is often the case that military bases will be placed strategically in relation to sites of cultural importance. We had an overview of the Hague Convention and discussed the work of the committee working on guidelines on how to implement the 2nd protocol of the Hague Convention.

It is interesting to consider that wars today are not necessarily between sovereign states and regular armies. We live in an age of terrorism and guerilla warfare, what do these factions know or care about the Blue Shield…?

Mr Albada gave us his opinion of the Blue Shield after Dr. Nouteva and hoped it would work to give more strength to the current legislation. He feels strongly that national Blue Shield Committees should be set up all over the world and should be giving practical help to train people in the convention and have drills, tools, set up contracts with people to move things, where to get plastic bags, freezers, plastic crates etc. so that the country is ready for disaster. Such preparedness is essential as we are after all discussing the preservation of ‘humankind’s treasures’.

The controversy of the Iraqi Jewish archive came up during this session. These are rare, historic and modern books, documents and parchment scrolls pertaining to the Iraqi Jewish community were found in the flooded basement of the Iraqi Intelligence (Mukhabahrat) headquarters in Baghdad in early May 2003. Upon removal from the basement, the wet materials (known as the Iraqi Jewish Archive) were packed into sacks and transported to a nearby location where they were partially dried. The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) arranged for the materials to be frozen, which served to stabilize the condition and eliminate further mold growth and they are presently in the University of Chicago to the chagrin of many in Iraq.
In addition to this the Iraq Memory Foundation in the United States has been courting controversy as it has gained control over important Baathist material. The Society of American Archivists and the Association of Canadian Archivists have issued a joint statement condemning the foundation’s gathering of the documents as “an act of pillage, which is specifically forbidden by the 1907 Hague Convention.”

‘International laws of war allow for an occupying power to acquire documents or archives deemed necessary for the conduct of war or occupation; the American military has acquired and continues to hold some 100 million pages of other archival material from Iraq. But the Iraq Memory Foundation, as a private group, does not fall under this provision, said Mark A. Greene, the president of the Society of American Archivists. “Its pretty unusual” for a nongovernmental entity “to gather up records and then essentially assert control over them,” Mr. Greene said.

However officials at the Hoover Institution and the Iraq Memory Foundation counter that the purpose of sending the Baathist documents to California has been misunderstood. Neither organization has asserted ownership of the documents, and both are in agreement with Iraqi officials that they should be returned to Iraq “in the not-too-distant future,” said Richard Sousa, senior associate director of the Hoover Institution.’ New York Times, June 30th 2008.

So interesting times – we will see what happens. I admire the SAA and ACA for issuing a statement and getting such top media coverage about the issue.

The last session I will run through with you is one on archival solidarity.This was established a project on the ICA committee the Section for Professional Associations (SPA), which I have been working on as secretary. It aims to co-ordinate efforts in the international archives community to carry out foreign assistance projects to develop tools and expertise for developing communities and communities in transition. The session was led by Nancy Marelli of Concorida University in Canada but she really led us all to speak for ourselves about what we want to do and what is needed.

The objectives of the project are to share information about international projects for development and cooperation; facilitate international projects for development and cooperation that are responsive, practical, and well-targeted and initiate international projects for development and cooperation. It gets individuals and organisations to work with partners to share professional information as well as send experts to provide training and education. projects can also be about providing expertise and/or materials to carry out archival projects. It helps match partners and find funding through a soon-to-be-ready funding database. It transpired that many people had experience through their institution of working internationally on solidarity pro0jects and the session was very productive. A lot of interest was expressed in the Digital Preservation Training programme. ICA already has a toolkit program developed by Pacific Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives (PARBICA) which has a series of culturally specific training modules on archives. There was considerable interest in our Digital Preservation Training Program here at ULCC: there is a real need for this type of training all over the world.

Sessions I would like to have gone too include how Darfur is being documented and how has the work of the United Nations in Sudan is been documented. The session was to describe the capacity building efforts of the United Nations Mission in Sudan in collaboration with the UNDP office in South Sudan and UNEP Nairobi office in the area of information management in an effort to boost transparency, good governance and access to information. I would like to have seen more of INTERPARES and others but they conflicted with my other sessions.

The conference had some sideshows at the same time, these included cinema and dance classes. Afraid I didn’t get to these but I did get to the a gala dinner, watch a three hour long show of Malaysian and Indian dancing with a multi course meal. Afterwards I went to the Traders bar to sip a mojito with the Petronus towers looming over head. Very Ridley Scott and very hot and fun (of course).

Patricia

I have attended a session on Data Stewardship (an Australian version of the DPTP) and a session on audio visual archives and digital preservation. I am just back from a session on community archiving in the muslim community in Australia. It was an initiative to engage with the community after the London and Bali bombings.

This morning I had an hour long meeting with ICA web designer which was interesting as I am trying to get him to help us improve things a bit.

As usual a lot of work happens here behind the scenes over coffee or maybe more. More later, have seen someone I know – Joan Boadas i Raset….goodbye from Kuala Lumpur. Here is a sign like that from my hotel. I have bought some Durian sweets for you to taste when i get back.

Patricia

The first day of the conference took place on the ‘day of the archivist’ which takes place each year on the 27th of March in Mexico, celebrating our wonderful profession! It was SEDCA’s annual meeting and it was planned to coincide with the Spring meeting of the International Council on Archives’ Section for Professional Associations (SPA). Most members of the steering committee of the section contributed to the conference along with our Mexican colleagues. Contributions were received from Sweden, who informed us about the history of their freedom of information law which is the oldest in the world and present day restraints which exist – e.g. all records are closed until someone asks for them! We also heard from our Dutch, Japanese and Israeli colleagues who all gave very interesting presentations on the background to their country’s archives and archival systems. I presented alongside Colleen McEwen who gave an overview of the records management system developed in Australia called DIRKS. It is concerned with building more efficient and accountable business practices through the design and encouragement of good recordkeeping.

I followed on in Spanish with a presentation about digital preservation, adapting some of our material from the DPTP and providing an example or 2 from the mexican experience managing to fit in a slide of the fascinating Dresden Codex. Both our shows went down well, and I got lots of questions both from the floor and afterwards. I even used our new interactive approach with the group of 400 archivists. They were very keen to do group work and participate. Their main worries concerned adequate support from IT staff as well as building good systems to manage their digital material. Migration was being looked at by several orgnaisations.

At the end of a long day of a lot of debate, coffee and fabulous biscuits we had an awards ceremony where institutions which had demonstrated commitment to the process of improving their archives and their archivists’ working conditions were given an award. This was taken very much to heart by both those giving and receiving them. As we were packing up to leave we were surprised by the sudden appearance of around 12 men who starting singing and playing various instruments – violins, trumpets, guitars etc – mariachis! they had been organised as a surprise way to end the day.

More news on Mexico visit to come in particular on the SPA meeting which was very interesting.

Hasta luego,

Patricia

Chaired by Professor Julia Boffey of Queen Mary, University of London, the event explored existing research projects between the two sectors, highlighted future possibilities, enabled a chance for the academic and archive communities to learn about each others areas and expertise; and to facilitate some new networking.

It also looked at the work MLA London has recently undertaken into ‘Revisiting Archives Collections’ and “how this methodology can support archivists to open up their collections for external comment and work with subject specialists, individuals or community groups to reveal, record and share new understanding of the record’s meaning and significance.” The project was overseen by an expert steering group with expertise in the area of archival description and cataloguing, including our own Kevin Ashley of the Digital Archives Team at ULCC. See MLA London website for the methodology toolkit.

Some key things I found particularly interesting:

• Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC): Programme Manager of the AHRC (Dr Gail Lambourne) flagged up that some core funding is being made available for strategic initiatives in key areas such as: Diaspora, Migration and Identities; Landscape and the Environment; Religion and Society; Beyond Text (ie non-textual meaning of communication); and the Museums and Galleries Research Programme.
• The Panel 6 postgraduate funding stream (Librarianship, Information and Museum Studies) offered by the AHRC is under-subscribed at present ie they encourage funding applications in this area, and are especially welcoming of those that relate to archives administration, where they have received few applications to-date.
• Within the AHRC, there is also vital ‘Knowledge Transfer’ funding available that allows for ‘resource enhancement’ eg in the form of exhibitions and additional cataloguing of collections.
• Tips for better funding applications: be specific in scope; importance of incorporating travel and other administrative/overhead costs as part of your funding applications; need clearly defined roles and responsibilities from outset; clear project brief and comprehensive planning; and use existing informal networks to encourage collaboration eg scholars, lecturers, larger and smaller organisations, independent research organisations.
• Revisiting Archives Methodology toolkit – MLA are lobbying/using this methodology to manifest the core importance of cataloguing to funders such as HLF. A training module is to be launched in the near future for this toolkit. The project was about producing a toolkit that could provide a systematic approach. Case studies at this seminar successfully revealed that this methodology has proved very effective for: community engagement; attracting new audiences to archive collections; ‘putting cataloguing at the heart of access’; ‘increasing the relevance and accountability of our work’; enabling Archivists to think about changing the focus and emphasis of their material and re-evaluate the potential of how Archivists work with the cataloguing and promotion of their collection; improving the detail, accuracy, outreach and significance of collections; giving a new insight into the public interest of certain items and their impact; it also helped to inform Archivists about research and user needs, and respond to the key themes affecting government policy (eg race relations, social inclusion, environment, ethics etc). UKAT and ISAD (G) were largely seen to be important and effective tools as part of the methodology, and not really found to be lacking in any way. It was however noted that there needs to be greater collaboration with users to ensure the outputs of consultation are accurately reflected in archival tools like UKAT eg make UKAT even more representative by adding more relevant terms related to under-represented groups etc.
• It was noted that a helpful way to accommodate and capture user input about collections is to make a link from the catalogue to the observational/emotional response offered by some users eg Your Archives, The National Archives’ online community of records users.
• It was suggested that archives could benefit from running a revisiting archives seminar for their users and academics in order to encourage greater community engagement and clarity about a way forward eg collaboratively developing exhibitions, learning materials and publications.
• A gap yet to be further pioneered by archives are digitised objects and the associated ancillary information representing user input about these. This is something that ULCC is hoping to explore as part of the National Digital Archive of Datasets (NDAD) service.
• Common problem noted for collaborative projects is the time-specific and project-based nature of most funding sources ie a lack of sustainable funding, especially for core activities like cataloguing and outreach. Collaboration on lifelong learning (eg via exhibitions and learning materials) was highlighted as an important opportunity through which to increase access to archives as well as a feature that is likely to attract further funding.

LCACE website: http://www.lcace.org.uk/home.php

Over 18 associations and 130 delegates participated in this one off event organised by the International Council on Archives (ICA) Section for Professional Associations (SPA) and the Ministry of Culture, Spain.

This event covered the role of archival associations in society, outreach and archival associations and the future of the professional association. Much of the event took place as round tables and it was great to see a lot of active participation from the floor.

After a suitably high powered introduction by the Spanish minister of culture (who paid for the whole event) and Cruz Mundet, Director of the Spanish National Archives Didier Grange kicked off proceedings with his presentation highlighting the lack of research in the area of archival associations which he aims to rectify by writing a book on said theme! Didier spoke of the history and background of associations. The oldest association was set up in the Netherlands in 1891 with the USA close second followed by Estonia in 1939. He noted that many were established post World War Two. The biggest society is ARMA with 11,000 members. He estimated that there are approximately 80,000 members of professional archival associations in the world.

Didier described the context of SPA’s creation. At the time of its creation It was felt that there needed to be more room for dealing with non governmental affairs. SPA was created to fill this gap within ICA. Didier noted that ICA is heavily subsidised by Governments and that associations contribute 1% to ICA’s budget. He suggested that governments remain to be represented by ICA but that associations should be represented by a federation and institutions are then in turn represented by their association.

Mark Green the present president of SAA(a one year post) then took the floor and described SAA’s various effective public policy efforts. These were situations where SAA fought and lobbied against proposed legislation. This included the situation where certain records relating to inmates in Guantanamo Bay were to be destroyed, SAA lobbied strongly against this. Advocacy of this kind is carried out by volunteers and not by lobby groups. Alan Weinstein stood up to the US Vice president regarding the incorrect classification of archives resulting in a Washington newspaper referring to our noble profession as the new macho heroes of society’.

SAA provide tips for media interview for their members as well as doing a lot of outreach to the general public.

A round table followed focussing on associations and governance. Discussions ensued about who qualifies for membership of associations around the world. Discussion also concerned the governance of associations as well as the relationship with national archives in our respective countries. It gave each Society a chance to publicise upcoming events! We agreed that self promotion has been a problem. It was interesting to note that while in Spain there is no specific training in archives, in Colombia all archives must have professionally trained archivists carry out archival roles.

Peter Lor the president of IFLA gave a fascinating talk about the role of IFLA. IFLA has a permanent HQ in The Hague and its most important members are nation associations.

It has 11 full time staff and 45 sections! These sections work on various topics such as guidelines, standards and publications as well as training sessions and workshops. Recognising the changing environment within which it works a new focus is now on climate change, ICT, internal political relations encompassing issues such as conflict. Socio economic factors are also considered such as the emergence of a powerful ageing population, migration, as well as the impact of HIV/AIDS on society and their relationship with libraries and books.

In the afternoon we had an archives fair where each association had a table and displayed their wares and websites for people to browse. Let it be noted that we carried our own material to Madrid on behalf of the Society!

Day 2 began with a round table on outreach and associations. It was interesting to hear the various approaches taken by associations as round the world. Kim Eberhard noted that the Australian Society of Archivists Australia commented that ASA have an alliance with a humanities based lobby group. This group teaches archivists skills about lobbying politicians. She noted that it is good to use other professions. With regard to outreach towards records creators the German archivists noted that they conduct campaigns. In Canada a conference called ‘archives and you’ is being organised aimed at non archivists.

Training and Certification followed next with interesting presentations by Chrisine Martinez, President of the AAF, Assocation des Archivistes Francais. AAF. Scott Goodine, President of the Association of Canadian Archivists who gave an overview of training course for archivists in Canada with the last session given by Cindy Smolovik, President of ACA, Academy of Certified Archivists, who gave us a brief talk about the process of certification by ACA USA.

Day 3 saw an unusual start to the day as Carlos Garcia Alix started the morning talking about his experience using archives in his work directing films. He gave a fascinating account of his research for his latest film on the Spanish Civil War.

The next Round Table on the future of archival associations was chaired by Berndt Fredriksson and saw active participation by delegates from Chile. Japan, Ivory Coast, Romania and Germany. Each representative gave us an overview of their association, their current projects and plans for the future. The Japanese Society – Zen Shiryo Kyo – aims to trim down its present governance structure so that there will be less administrative work and costs. In the Ivory Coast Anne Marie Tche Tche described the struggle to keep their association going and noted that the alliance with SPA has helped give them a voice in the world. German archival visions include being the voice of all archivists in Germany as well as attempting to identify the role of the archivist in society.

The congress provided a marvellous forum for everyone to exchange views and experiences. We saw how situations for associations differ all over the world but of course we do have a lot in common. The topics which were raised during the event included

• We noticed that there are both institutions and individuals in our associations and it is important to remember that employer and employee have different needs within an association.
• Certification -it is a good idea but we must convince employers of its benefits.
• In Europe and North America access is not as complicated an issue as in many other countries around the world.
• Lobbying and outreach are extremely important. We realised that it is not easy to reach beyond our immediate profession.
• It is essential that we pin down our competencies and this must be done soon.

As Fred Van Kan reminded us in his summing up – we have a beautiful important profession dealing with a wide range of issues – history, human rights, identity and memory. We must never forget this or the value of association.