Weekly News Roundup and report on ALA-ICA, December 12, 2017

Blog posts and news

• Folklore Archives, Folklore in Archives, ICA-SUV blog post,  December 6, 2017
• Archives with Palestine: Getting the SAA to back BDS, Human Rights Archives Section blog post, December 8, 2017, https://hrarchives.wordpress.com/
• Irish folklore archive inscribed into UNESCO register, RTE, December 6, 2017.
• Registre de la Mémoire du monde : l’UNESCO représentée à l’ouverture officielle de l’exposition permanente à l’Institut historique juif de Varsovie, UNESCO press release, November 21, 2017,
• 200,000 died in Guatemala’s civil war — this digital archive is finally bringing families closure, The Verge, December 5, 2017
• South Africa: Photographer Ernest Cole – of Bondage and Freedom – Discovery of Trove of Negatives a Game Changer, Daily Maverick, November 30, 2017
• In Decades Old Photos, Parallels to Puerto Rico’s Rudimentary Reality, NYT, Nov. 27, 2017

New tools

• JHOVE 1.18 released on International Digital Preservation Day: A new version of JHOVE is now available for the digital preservation community to download and use. JHOVE is the reference open source file format identification, validation and characterisation tool for digital preservation, and part of the OPF reference toolset. https://github.com/openpreserve/jhove/releases/latest.
• veraPDF 1.10 released on International Digital Preservation Day: The latest version of veraPDF is now available to download. veraPDF is an open source PDF/A validator, and version 1.10 marks the first release of veraPDF as part of the Open Preservation Foundation’s (OPF) reference toolset.

Resources

• Internationale Archivbibliographie, Archivschule Marburg, https://www.online.uni-marburg.de/archivschule/

Calls/upcoming workshops

• Refugee Rights in Records Symposium, January 10, 2018, Central European University, https://informationasevidence.org/symposium
• Annual Conference:  29 to 31 August 2018, Glasgow, UK – Call for Papers: ‘People make Records’ (deadline December 13, 2017),http://conference.archives.org.uk/
• 2018 ASA National Conference: ARCHIVES IN A BLADE RUNNER AGE: IDENTITY & MEMORY, EVIDENCE & ACCOUNTABILITY

In an era of fake news, alternative facts and technological disruption, how can we nurture reliable shared memory that provides the foundation of identity and ensures the accountability of our institutions to society?

Call for Papers Closes: 28 February, 2018

https://www.archivists.org.au/learning-publications/2018-conference

SAA at the ALA-ICA Annual Conference 2017 in Mexico City, November 27-29

This past November the Association of Latin American Archives (ALA) came together with the International Council on Archives (ICA) for their annual meetings and the subsequent conference. The themes of the conference were archives, citizenship, and interculturalism. Archivists from all over the world came together to discuss the importance of preserving the records of human experience as a means to challenge authoritarianism, violation of human rights, racism and discrimination. Caribbean countries who are experiencing the aftermath of a catastrophic hurricane season issued a call for archivists to document the countries that cause the most climate change and to contrast them with the ones who suffer the consequences the most in order to demand accountability. The preservation and promotion of the cultural heritage of Mexican indigenous cultures highlighted the theme of multiculturalism.

SAA had a pretty active role at the conference. SAA President Tanya Zanish-Belcher discussed the challenges faced by archivists at the U.S. and the way in which SAA is counteracting against them via training programs and other initiatives. She also discussed academic programs to integrate students to archival activities at Wake Forest University. In the same panel, Joel A. Blanco Rivera, past LACCHA co-chair, alongside colleagues from Colombia and Brazil, discussed academic programs to train archivists in Puerto Rico and Chile. At another panel, Natalie Baur, another past LACCHA co-chair, discussed the project she led at the University of Miami to collect and preserve the tweets Cuban Americans issued on the declaration of the normalization of U.S./Cuba relations that President Barack Obama issued in 2015. Baurs’s presentation stirred the audience and ALA archivists discussed the possibility of having workshops in Latin America regarding the collection and preservation of tweets.

One of the highlights of SAA’s activity was the meeting between SAA President and ALA President, Dra. Mercedes de Vega, director of Mexico’s National Archives. They discussed possible collaborations between SAA and ALA. Finally, several SAA members used the opportunity to get together and to get a glimpse of Mexico City.