2013 Annual Meeting

International Archival Affairs Roundtable Meeting Minutes

Wednesday August 14, Hilton Hotel, New Orleans

3:00 Welcoming comments from Brad Bauer, IAART Ad Hoc Steering Committee

3:10 Announcement of Roundtable election results. A run-off election for Member-at-large (2 years) was done. Election results were:

Senior Co-Chair (1 year):  Brad Bauer (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Junior Co-Chair (1 year, followed by 1 year as senior):  Christian Kelleher (Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas)

Member-at-large (3 years):  Christopher Laico (Columbia University)

Member-at-large (2 years):  Ryder Kouba (University of Houston)

Member-at-large (1 year):  Danielle Scott (Hoover Institution, Stanford University)

3:15 Announcement by representative of the 2014 Program Committee, and encouragement by Senior Co-Chair Brad Bauer for panel proposals.

Bauer recognized the members of the IAART Ad Hoc Committee for their work formalizing the Roundtable in the past year.

3:20 Presentation on the Displaced Archives Project by Project members Mario Ramirez and Douglas Cox.

3:30 Presentation by David Leitch, Secretary General of the International Council on Archives. Leitch gave a brief introduction to ICA, its history, membership, and mission to preserve archives and improve access at an international level. He emphasized that ICA has recently democratized, broadened its membership base beyond national archives. He discussed the Universal Declaration on Archives, and emphasized an ICA focus on digital preservation. Leitch highlighted ICA publications such as Comma, Flash, their annual report, and the free e-newsleter. He reported on a conversation with the SAA leadership and posed the question, what does SAA have to offer ICA?, rather than what can ICA do for SAA.

In a Q&A session Leitch was asked about ICA’s practice in questions such as the return of Korean diaries from Paris, and responded that ICA’s role was to enable solutions to be found rather than take a specific stance. There was discussion of ICA’s activity or possible activity in Latin America. Leitch highlighted AtoM, the Access to Memory project. There was a question and brief discussion on how to formalize programs enabling archivists to volunteer professionally on an international scale.

4:15 Outgoing SAA Council liaison Kate Theimer, introduced incoming liaison Helen Wong Smith. Theimer highlighted the call for diversity in formats for presentations at future SAA conferences, and also increased availability of content from conferences. 2005-2007 session recordings are currently available on the SAA website, and more are coming.Theimer discussed how part of the Strategic Plan is to increase activity internationally, and confirmed the Council’s support for ICA. Council adopted a revised charge for the SAA/ACA representative to SPA (ICA Section of Professional Associations) and suspension of the SAA contribution to NAANICA, the North American branch of ICA.

4:30 Open Floor

A member of the Diasporic Literary Archives project (http://www.diasporicarchives.com/) presented on the project’s goals to examine the implications of why literary collections move around internationally, and highlighted institutions offering temporary deposit of literary archives currently in jeopardy and repatriating them at a future date.

Susanne Belovari of the ICA Section on University and Research Institution Archives introduced the “Online Archivists Biography Project” to create a directory of college and university archivists, and encouraged participation in the Section’s annual meeting in Paris.

Mario Ramirez gave an update on the development of the U.S. Chapter of Archivist Without Borders, which is working toward non-profit incorporation (http://awbuschapter.wordpress.com/).

An announcement was made from email from Pat Grimsted on repatriation of archives from Russia and her book Returned From Russia.

An announcement was made from email from Trudy Peterson about the ICA Human Rights Working Group newsletter, available by joining the ICA listserv (http://www.ica.org/3321/about-archives-and-human-rights-group/about-archives-and-human-rights.html). 

Bryan Corbett made a call for participation in his upcoming dictionary project with Luciana Duranti.

4:50 Meeting adjourned.

--notes by Christian Kelleher, Junior Co-Chair