Action plan to safeguard the archives of national and regional movements
Following a successful workshop on archival awareness on 31 March 2014 at the ADVN in Antwerp, NISE is together with UNPO setting out an action plan regarding endangered archives of national and regional movements.
Archival awareness is the start of any archival activity; if a person, organisation or community as a whole does not consciously see the fundamental need to keep and safeguard archives, any other effort towards them is useless. The cooperation therefore started in 2014 with a workshop on archival awareness.
Following an introduction aimed at providing the basic knowledge and skills necessary for archival management, the full-day workshop took on a practical approach, whereby participants were encouraged to present their own experiences, in order to assess together how archives can be used to share knowledge and best practices on issues pertinent to the preservation of social, cultural, political and economic rights (see more at nise.eu/news/workshop-on-archival-awareness). The workshop laid bare the archival needs of the participants, not least with regard to the material survival of archives and digital security.
This first successful NISE – UNPO initiative signalled a clear interest and need for the development of a number of further activities, structured into an action plan, in order to eventually arrive at an archival landscape satisfying for all parties concerned. Stroking with the recent, more democratic, paradigm of ‘participatory archives’ or ‘activist archiving’, the plan includes, but is not limited to, the following actions:
- distributing a questionnaire designed to map in detail the actual situation;
- conducting sessions with archival creators during UNPO’s yearly ‘SpeakOut!’ trainings or missions on location;
- making available a manual specifically designed for archival safeguarding and management;
- assembling specialist archivists into a thinktank to uphold professional standards;
See here for more information and for contact addresses.