The 9th International Council on Archives Conference ( https://ica2022roma.com/ ), entitled Archives: Bridging the Gap , was held in Rome on 21, 22 and 23 September, with the participation of Archivists Without Borders (AsF). The ICA International Council Conference is held annually, except in the year of the ICA Congress, and is the main international archival event of the year. The ICA has 198 members from different countries, and works to bring together sections with common professional interests and regions with distinct and different archival traditions. The Programme Commission focuses on the main professional challenges and works to develop solutions and products to support members in their work, as well as to represent the interests of archives and records management, providing advice and content in international cultural, heritage, governmental and technological representative bodies and initiatives. All these axes come together at the conference to be presented, discussed and developed, and to inspire new initiatives and approaches for ICA bodies.
The Rome Conference wanted to highlight the diversity that characterizes contemporary societies and the objective was to raise awareness, provide proposals and possible solutions to reduce the gap in concepts such as globality and locality, between the public and the private, aspects that affect technology, among others, so that a development occurs where the different participants thrive from their specific reality within society, and where archives play a fundamental role as active agents.
The presentation in which AsF participated was held in the Auditorium Antonianum, the conference venue, in front of 125 attendees, as part of the session Archival Solidarity: Archivists helping each other in times of war and peace. Archivists without Borders International (AsF-I) was represented by Christine Martinez, from AsF France; M. Elena Porras, from AsF Ecuador and Núria Carreras from AsF Spain. Under the title of the presentation Archival Solidarity of Archivists without Borders, the three participants presented some of the projects developed by the different sections of AsF International over time, since its creation.
The session led by Meg Phillips, ICA Vice President of Programs, included other interventions such as the one given by Emilie Gagnet Leumasen under the heading Protecting Cultural Heritage: ICA’s role in times of conflict , referring to the roles of archivists in times of conflict, and the shared presentation between Dr. David Christopher Sutton, Dr. Luisa Franco and Arda Scholteel entitled Safe Havens for Archives at Risk: a report on progress , where they highlighted the progress of the reports of safe havens for archives at risk.
The contribution of AsF Spain focused on the training project developed, in collaboration with the National Archive of Bosnia and Herzegovina, between 2001 and 2005, with the aim of facilitating the organization of the documentary collections of the archives that survived the Balkan War, aimed at technical staff and unqualified workers in the field of the archives of the National Archive of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the municipal archives of this Republic. In a second section of the intervention, the current collaboration project with the National Archive of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic for the preservation of the documentation generated by the Sahrawi government in exile was presented, which aims to provide them with a working methodology that allows them to manage and preserve their documentary collections and the maintenance of the human resources that work for their proper maintenance.
Although these two projects are widely known among the members and followers of AsF Spain, this conference was an excellent opportunity to highlight the organization’s charitable work and its international reach. For its part, AsF France presented the project for missions in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, the project for good governance in Burkina Faso and the security and processing of international adoption archives. And to conclude the presentation, AsF Ecuador presented the project for recovering the memory of the Kayambi people.
With this joint participation of the three sections of AsF, the archivist group present at the conference was able to have a broader vision of what the entity is and its proposal at an international level with different projects that encompass training, democracy, good governance, the memory and identity of peoples, individual and collective rights, under the premise of solidarity.
The Conference had a wide participation of projects that referred to current objectives such as climate change, the review of colonial archives to transform them into more inclusive archives, community archives and marginalized groups, or archives bridging social and human rights strategies. A series of communications, presentations and talks that gave a broad vision of the current concerns of archivists and archival and information professionals.
Finally, taking advantage of this framework, AsF contacted people and entities interested in collaborating together and which we hope will be a starting point for new projects.
A noteworthy element of this Conference was the recognition of the widely known career of two people linked to AsF, both for their outstanding contributions to the ICA and to the archival profession in general at an international level, such as Ramon Alberch, founding president of AsF and former president of AsF International, and Joan Boadas, head of the Document Management, Archives and Publications Service of Girona City Council and member of AsF. Both were recognized with the nomination as Fellow of the International Council on Archives (ICA), and Joan Boadas was also recognized with the Emmett Leahy Award. From these lines, WE CONGRATULATIONS!
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