IAAS News & Announcements September 2019

*The August 2019 Newsletter of the ICA Human Rights Working Group is available online. This edition is particularly rich, and includes many human rights related news items and announcements from around the globe.

Here is an excerpt from Trudy Huskamp Peterson’s commentary:

“Archivists have thought a great deal about coping with disasters, such as floods and hurricanes that result in (usually) temporary displacement. And archivists have given some thought to disaster preparedness, too. But inexorable climate change requires a longer strategy. Archives of all kinds will have to assess the risk, decide how to mitigate that risk, and take action, which may take years to accomplish. Does the archives move? Does it stay in place but send security copies to another location, either in the country or outside? Does it need evacuation plans? Will building changes, like a seawall, be enough? “

More at: https://www.ica.org/en/hrwg-newsletter-august-2019

* Documentary Heritage News, September 19, 2019, http://documentary-heritage-news.blogspot.com/

* The Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies (JCAS) is excited to announce that its research article “Developing a Typology of Human Rights Records” by Noah Geraci and Michelle Caswell, both of the University of California, has been translated into Portuguese. The translation appears in volume 12, number 3 of the Brazilian information science journal Revista Ibero-Americana de Ciência da Informação (RICI).

Download the original article published in JCAS (English): elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol3/iss1/1

Download the translated article published in RICI (Portuguese): periodicos.unb.br/index.php/RICI/article/view/24467

* Please check out the wonderful comprehensive international archives bibliography  published by the Archivschule Marburg, Germany. It does have an English language search mask and includes many English language publications:

*The Feminist Library MONAliesA in Leipzig publishes guidelines for the digitization of movement archives:

The brochure is available online: online  (in German).

Upcoming events:

World Digital Preservation Day will be on November 7, 2019. The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) invites all data creators, curators and consumers from around the world to contribute and prepare to share stories of their own ‘digital preservation day!’

Survey to identify hosting institutions for archives/records at risk by Swiss Peace . For more information contact Swiss Peace: http://archivesproject.swisspeace.ch/

 

Weekly News Roundup — August 2, 2019

ICA News

* The Call for Projects FIDA 2020 is now open! The deadline is 30 September 2019.

The Trustees of the ICA Fund for the International Development of Archives (FIDA) invite members, branches and other bodies to submit proposals for ICA/FIDA support for archival projects.

Visit the ICA website to know more about the call, the process and to get the FIDA forms.

https://www.ica.org/en/fida-call-for-projects-2020

Proposals will not be accepted after 30 September 2019.

For further information contact us at fida@ica.org

News and Resources

* Documentary Heritage News, vol. 12, no. 48

*Reflections on the Development of the Movement and International
Humanitarian Law through the Lens of the International Committee of the Red
Cross Library’s Heritage Collection, July 26, 2019,
http://blogs.icrc.org/cross-files/reflections-on-the-development-of-the-movement-and-international-humanitarian-law-through-the-lens-of-the-icrc-library-s-heritage-collection/

*Guatemala Declares War on History, July 30, 2019,
http://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/30/guatemala-declares-war-on-history-dirty-war-archives-jimmy-morales/

* Ancestry Digitizes Millions of Holocaust and Nazi Persecution Related
Archives, http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190731005034/en/Ancestry%C2%AE-Digitizes-Millions-Holocaust-Nazi-Persecution-Related

* Accessing Archives in a Post-Soviet World: the Georgian Experience, July 26, 2019
http://www.opengovpartnership.org/stories/accessing-archives-in-a-post-soviet-world-the-georgian-experience/

*The Christie’s Affair: the Looting and Sale of Indigenous Artifacts, Atlantic Council blog, July 26, 2019
http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/the-christie-s-affair-the-looting-and-sale-of-indigenous-artifacts

Calls and meetings

* Imagined Pasts: Colonialism, Photography, and Archives, November 4-5, 2019, Lisbon (Portugal)

Deadline: September 10, 2019

http://gi-imperios.org/blog/cfp-imagined-pasts-colonialism-photography-and-archives/

*Kriegsfolgenarchivgut: Entschädigung, Lastenausgleich und Wiedergutmachung in Archivierung
und Forschung, Bundesarchiv, Lastenausgleicharchiv Bayreuth, 14./15 October 2019, https://www.bundesarchiv.de/DE/Content/Veranstaltungen/2019-10-14-tagung-kriegsfolgenarchivgut-bayreuth.html

* Decolonising Copyright, Building our Creative & Information Economy, meeting in South Africa, August 2019, http://infojustice.org/archives/41466

 

Weekly News Roundup — July 22, 2019

News

• Color footage shows lunar astronauts in Australia
• Race is on to save tapes of indigenous languages
• 25,000 images made available at the Arab Image Foundation
• The Tate acquires the Ithell Colquhoun archive
• Preserving the memories of Aleppo
• IFLA discusses global information partnerships at UN event on sustainability
• 1775 manuscript travels from Galway to Philadelphia for exhibition
• Story of an elephant kept above of bakery in eighteenth century Edinburgh
• Archivist discusses the life of the gay Jewish bullfighter from Brooklyn
• Delhi archives will be available for download soon

Calls

• August 15 – Australian conference on Digital Research across the Humanities
• September 30 – HIV/AIDS in the 21st Century: Memorialization, Representation and Temporality conference in Manchester
• November 30 – RISE IMET international conference on Emerging Technologies and the Digital Transformation of Museums and Heritage Sites

 

Weekly News Roundup — June 28, 2019

News

• Cambridge University archivists catalogue records from the court of assizes on the island of Ely
• Goa and Oman build relationship with archives
• Stralsund City Archives show that blogger invented her family of Holocaust victims
• Peace treaties of the Great War displayed at history conference
• Czech archivist finds that aide to former British Prime Minister did not know his contacts were spies
• First steps toward starting a new building for the national archives of Malta
• The problems of archiving hip hop
• Three day workshop in South Africa, Public History and Archiving Struggle from Below, included exhibit on James Sofasonke Mpanza, the “Father of Soweto”
• Art Gallery of Ontario aquires collection of Caribbean photographs

Calls

• July 1 – Proposed panel on “Silence in/of Archives: Absence, Erasure, Censorship, and Archival Politics” for the 6th European Congress on World and Global History
• August 1 – Play On! research colloquium at McGill University
• November 30 – International Conference on Emerging Technologies and the Digital Transformation of Museums and Heritage Sites

Exhibits

• Archival documents part of exhibit about connections between the Romanovs and the Jacobites
• UC-Irvine exhibit on material found in US archives about Korean “comfort women”

 

Weekly News Roundup — June 2, 2019

* Celebrate International Archives Week June 3-9, 2019, #IAW2019, https://www.ica.org/en/international-archives-week-3-9-june-2019

* Alert from the National Security Archives: Imminent Threat to Guatemala’s Historical Archive of the National Police (AHPN):

“Washington, D.C., May 30, 2019 – The National Security Archive joins our international and Guatemalan colleagues in calling for the protection of the Historical Archive of the National Police (AHPN) of Guatemala, which faces new threats to its independence and to public access to its holdings.

In a press conference on Monday, May 27, Interior Minister Enrique Degenhart signaled his intent to assert his agency’s control of the AHPN including the prospect of new restrictions on access to the archived police records and possible legal action against “foreign institutions” holding digitized copies of the documents. Degenhart made his statements as a crucial deadline approached to renew an agreement that for a decade has kept the archive under the authority of the Ministry of Culture and Sports. The agreement now appears to be in jeopardy.” (…)

Information about ways to take action and more background information can be found at the National Security Archives website: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/news/guatemala/2019-05-30/imminent-threat-guatemalas-historical-archive-national-police-ahpn

*Update on the situation of the Lukács Archives in Budapest, May 23, 2019, Social History Portal, International Association of Labour History Associations,  https://socialhistoryportal.org/news/articles/309715

* The ITS in Bad Arolsen is now officially called: Arolsen Archives – International Center on Nazi Persecution: https://arolsen-archives.org/en/

New resources:

*Thanks to David Rajotte’s Documentary Heritage News

*Krista McCracken, Challenging Colonial Spaces: Reconciliation and Decolonizing Work in Canadian Archives, Canadian Historical Review, vol. 100, issue 2, June 2019,

*Ashley Edwards, Partnership, vol. 14, no. 1 (2019), Unsettling the Future by Uncovering the Past: Decolonizing Academic Libraries and Librarianship, http://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index.php/perj/article/view/5161

*Petros Apostolopoulos, Producing Historical Knowledge on Wikipedia, http://commons.lib.jmu.edu/mhr/vol16/iss1/4/

*Matthew Budman, Book Collecting Now: the Value of Print in a Digital Age, http://www.chatwinbooks.com/shop/book-collecting-now

*Jay David Bolter, The Digital Plenitude: the Decline of Elite Culture and the Rise of New Media, http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/digital-plenitude

*Unesco – Legacies of Slavery: a Resource Book for Managers of Sites andItineraries of Memory (Including link to the resource book), http://en.unesco.org/news/new-publication-legacies-slavery-resource-book-managers-sites-and-itineraries-memory

*Video – Decolonial Futures for Colonial Metadata: 1838-present

 

*Michael Press, Who really owns the past? Cultural heritage is an ideal imposed from above. Aeon, http://aeon.co/essays/why-cultural-heritage-benefits-the-rich-and-powerful-above-all

*British Museum must recognise its own powers in matters of restitution: Case of Ethiopian tabots shows that trustees’ hands are not tied when it comes to the disposal of certain items from the collection, The Art Newspaper, May 29, 2019, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/comment/british-museum-must-recognise-its-own-powers

 

Weekly News Roundup- May 24, 2019

ICA’s invitation to celebrate International Archives Week:

How to plan a successful International Week step by step: for more info go here. We invite you to celebrate the International Archives Week on the theme of the conference Adelaide 2019, “Designing the Archive” which will take place in South Australia from 21 to 25 October.

From Monday 3 to Sunday 9 June 2019, celebrate the International Archives Week in your institution, your company or your department. Use this global event for archivists and records managers in order to make known the role of archives and share your experience and the importance of your work. Show that the archives profession is fun, inclusive, varied and that your expertise is helpful to everyone.

News around the world (highlights from the ICA’s Human Rights Working Group Newsletter)

Rwanda to sustain push for transfer of genocide archives. The government will not relent in its pursuit for the transfer of archives of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, which are housed at the Arusha-based International Residue Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, the Minister for Justice, Johnston Busingye, has said. Go here.

Génocide des Tutsi au Rwanda : une commission d’enquête française crée des tensions chez les historiens. French president Emmanuel Macron announced the appointment of an eight person commission to consult “all France’s archives relating to the [Rwandan] genocide . . in order to analyse the role and engagement of France during that period.” The commissioners “will have access to classified documents from the foreign and defence ministries but also the DGSE, France’s external intelligence service, and reportedly the archives of then president Francois Mitterrand,” The Telegraph reported. Tensions over the composition of the commission were reported in Jeune Afrique. https://www.jeuneafrique.com/757783/politique/genocide-des-tutsi-au-rwanda-une-commission-denquete-francaise-cree-des-tensions-chez-les-historiens

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/04/05/france-throw-open-archives-rwanda-genocide-clarify-role-25-years

Belgium Apologizes for Kidnapping Children From African Colonies. Belgium’s prime minister officially apologized “for the kidnapping, segregation, deportation and forced adoption of thousands of children born to mixed-race couples during its colonial rule of Burundi, Congo and Rwanda,” the New York Times reported. “An estimated 10,000 to 20,000 children were segregated from their parents . . and placed in orphanages and schools predominantly run by the Catholic Church.” The prime minister said the government will provide resources to finance research on the separations, “open up its colonial archives to metis people, and offer administrative help to those seeking to gain access to their official records and seeking Belgian nationality.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/world/europe/belgium-kidnapping-congo-rwanda-burundi.html

Declassification Diplomacy: Trump Administration Turns Over Massive Collection of Intelligence Records on Human Rights and Argentina. The U.S. gave Argentina the final tranche of declassified U.S. government records created between 1975 and 1984 related to human rights abuses committed during the military dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983). The transfer marked the end of the “largest government-to-government declassification release in United States history,” the U.S. National Archives said. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/southern-cone/2019-04-12/declassification-diplomacy-trump-administration-turns-over-massive-collection-intelligence-records

Russia returned communist party archive to Israel ‘almost secretly’“Russian authorities have returned the archive of Israel’s communist party, which was taken from Tel Aviv to Moscow in 1977,” reported Middle East Monitor. At that time the party “feared that the [recently elected] right-wing Likud-led government would seize the archive, so it was sent to Moscow.” The archive was actually returned in May 2015 to Israel’s National Library, but “the move has only just been revealed by local media sources inside Israel.”https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190424-russia-returned-communist-party-archive-to-israel-almost-secretly/

Archivists race to digitize slavery records before the history is lost. Using British colonial records of the slave trade that “in many cases” include in the descriptions “drawings of facial scars made by Africans to show their origins and identities,” a researcher at Canada’s Trent University is developing a computer program to recognize and catalog the scars, reported PRI. The data will be fed into the international information hub called “Enslaved,” which is scheduled to go online in 2020. Meanwhile, the national archives of Sierra Leone holds the original records in buildings “with broken windows, frequent power failures and no air-conditioning.”https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-04-04/archivists-race-digitize-slavery-records-history-lost

Weekly News Roundup – May 17, 2019

News

• Newly discovered diary chronicles Jewish girl’s life in Nazi-occupied Budapest
• Episcopal Diocese of Egypt opens new archive in Cairo
• Australian television show features genealogical search for Scottish medical family
• Geneva Bible from the Carnegie theft discovered in the Netherlands
• Details of the Lisbon earthquake revealed in archived letters of nuns in exile
• Film of interview with a Singapore film archivist
• First-hand account of the Punjab Archives
• Interview with an artist who treats photographs as records of German history
• March 2019 piece on the history of archives in the nation of Georgia
• Much of the early internet has disappeared
• Get ready for International Archives Week
• Human Rights Working Group Newsletter May 2019 released

Calls

• May 27 Freedom Road and Its Intersections: The Struggles for the Liberation of Southern and Central Africa conference
• May 31 – DH Budapest 2019 conference on distant reading
• July 19 – Special feature section, “American Studies in the Archive” in The New Americanist from the University of Warsaw

Exhibits

• Early medical photographs at the Australian Museum in Sydney
• Vintage technology at the New Zealand National Library
• Old neighborhood photographs of Toronto

 

Weekly News Roundup – April 19th, 2019

News

• Ancient site in Australia recreated with VR technology
• Podcast on Mukurtu for indigenous archives
• Digitizing Nazi photos from shattered glass negatives
• Images that could help rebuild Notre Dame
• US completes release of records on Argentina’s dirty war
• Lest We Forget project to collect World War I items in the United Kingdom
• New translations document the Armenian diaspora
• Nelson Mandela’s archivist reflects on how we should remember
• Kerala archive is a treasure trove for film lovers
• Mexico releases spy agency files on current president

Calls

• April 30 – Media Cultures of the (Inter/Anti) Imperial Pacific edition of Media Fields Journal
• May 31 – Papers for the Triannual Unisa School of Arts Conference in South Africa on Africa’s Position in the 4th Industrial Revolution

Exhibits

• Bo-Kaap exhibit in Cape Town
• Rolling Stones exhibit moves to Japan
• The Imperial Ghost in the Neoliberal Machine opens in New York

Weekly News Roundup – April 14th, 2019

SAA news

The deadline to submit proposals for pop-up sessions at the SAA conference in Austin is on May 15, 2019: https://www2.archivists.org/am2019/program/Calls-for-Proposals/Pop-Up-and-Working-Groups

ICA News

* Please review the latest Human Rights Working Group Newsletter (March 2019), edited and compiled by Trudy Huskamp Peterson. Here is an excerpt, focusing on the threat for people and archives from climate change:

“What we need now–all over the world but especially in locations under threat from climate change—is to map the location of historical archives and current records and to overlay that map with maps of climate change impacts (for example, the map of sea level change https://sealevel.nasa.gov/understanding-sea-level/key-indicators/global-mean-sea-level ). That would allow us to identify the materials that need to be either relocated within the nation or, as a last resort, stored (digital copy or analog) in an external safe haven.”

* The Guiding Principles for Safe Havens for Archives at Risk (Feb. 18, 2019) are now online at  https://www.ica.org/en/release-of-the-guiding-principles-for-safe-havens-for-archives-at-risk

* ICA Flash newsletter number 37 is available, including in-depth reports from the ICA meeting in Yaounde. Unfortunately, it is only available for ICA members. Please contact the IAAS steering committee if you are interested in reading the latest issue.

Other international archival news

* Documentary Heritage News, vol. 12, no. 32

* The Association des archivistes français met in Saint-Étienne

* The French Archivists without Borders met there as well –it is worthwhile spending some time on their website: http://archivistessansfrontieres.fr/ASF-France-au-Forum-de-l-AAF

Rwanda:

* BBC news, April 5, 2019: Rwanda genocide: Macron orders probe of France’s role. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47826841

* Rwanda: Belgium to Return Rwandan Files in 2 Years

* See also: Francia abre sus archivos a 25 años del genocidio en Ruanda, Mundo, Uruguay, April 6, 2019, https://www.elpais.com.uy/mundo/francia-abre-archivos-anos-genocidio-ruanda.html

Resources

Digital Humanities Centre at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland. Guidelines how to Facilitate Cooperation between Humanities Researchers and Cultural Heritage Institutions. Online at: https://zenodo.org/record/2587481

 

Weekly News Roundup – April 5th, 2019

News

• Two letters by Tesla surface in Serbia
• Obituary for Edda Tasiemka
• Documents from the Cuban revolution saved from fire at the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum in St. Louis
• Chief Archivist of Archives New Zealand announces disposal moratorium on records of Royal Commission of Inquiry in Historical Abuse in State Care
• The Last of the Polish Jews film rediscovered
• Archives show that West German investigation of Stasi meddling mirrors Muehler report
• The dire state of news archiving
• Archivists in Sierra Leone race to digitize slavery records
• Using x-rays and artificial intelligence to read unopened documents

Exhibits

• Castle archivist honors duchess who was Scotland’s first female MP
• Lost Vienna revealed at UBC
• Scotch Whisky Experience to remain in Edinburgh for ten more years

Calls

• April 10 – Beyond the Printing Press conference papers
• May 2 – Deadline extended for applications for the awards from the Coordinating Council for Women in History
• July 1 – The Journal of New Librarianship invites submissions from library scholars, practitioners, and students for its next issue