International Council of Archives

Inauguration speech by the President of the International Council on Archives

Martin Berendse, National Archivist of the Netherlands, Oslo, September 17, 2010

Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished colleagues,

This is my very first public speech on my very first day as president of the International Council on Archives. When I think about the many distinguished people who have stood here before me and who have contributed so much to the growth and success of our organisation, I am excited and inspired to help launch us into a new period.

It is also the first time that the Presidency has been contested and it shows that the ICA is becoming more mature as an open and democratic organisation. It is pleasing that the election was conducted in such a friendly spirit. I am deeply grateful to the other candidate Graham Dominy, who accepted the result so graciously and is keen to continue playing a very active role in the ICA.

I am very fortunate to be surrounded by a talented team of able and engaged Vice Presidents. I welcome Vu Thi Minh Huong to the post of Vice President of Marketing and Promotion and Andreas Kellerhals, who succeeds me as Vice-President Finance. The ICA is deeply grateful to Lew Bellardo for continuing in the arduous role of Vice President Programme.

Atakilty Assgedom from Ethiopia, a former member of the CITRA bureau, has courageously taken on the task of chairing our Audit Committee at a time of major change in our organisation. We should also congratulate the other newly elected members of the CITRA bureau and the Audit Commission and express our thanks to the new members of PCOM, as well as to those who are staying on until 2012.

 

I am not at all the first Dutchman standing in front of you. Many of my fellow countrymen have been active in the ICA. For example Eric Ketelaar, who was the first vice president in the late nineteen nineties. He is still Honorary President. I am not able to tell you why the Netherlands is always so active internationally, but perhaps Joseph Luns, a great statesman whose archives we keep at the ‘Nationaal Archief', made the point best saying: ‘the Netherlands itself covers a very small territory, so that leaves a lot of foreign affairs'.

 

The predecessor uppermost in my mind is of course Dirk Graswinckel, one of the founding fathers and the second President of ICA in 1953. He was deeply aware of the need of international cooperation immediately after World War II. In his very first speech as ICA president he stated: ‘An archivist is someone who first of all thinks of the future'. And that is why we are here today.

 

The history of the ICA and international archival cooperation

What started as a network - or a round table - of national archivists 60 years ago, is now a huge network of professionals, institutions and networks in the public and private sector; employing hundreds of staff in large institutions as well as individual businesses, in countries which have the latest technologies but also where there is a lack of basic infrastructure. Today, the ICA has more than 1500 members from 195 different nationalities.

 

This is something we must be proud of, but there is still a lot of work to do. The world has changed and there are still a lot of challenges left for archives: the accelerating pace of technological change, the creation of vast amounts of electronic data, the impact of social media on society, in addition to increasing demands on archives from decision makers and the wider public. This, my friends and colleagues, urges us to change our traditional inside-out approach into an outside-in approach instead. First of all archives and archivists have to become part of today's information society. I think a lot of speakers in CITRA pointed out the last 2 days very clearly that our objectives might be the same as a hundred years ago, but our approach has to change dramatically. "We need to continually reassess our presumptions of what constitutes digital information and our roles and responsibilities in relation to it, like the new national archivist and librarian of Canada stated. Listening to him and his colleagues from China, Japan, Russia, USA and UK my conclusion is that the need for a cultural change within our institutions is the most challenging part of our agenda. How do we act in the societies were horizontal networks are more important than vertical structures?, as Terry Cook stated yesterday. First of all ICA has to be the platform for reassessment and innovation of our profession, helping us to realize that outside-in approach.

 

ICA has accomplished a great deal in reforming its organization and structure, a process that has been sustained with great determination by my distinguished predecessor Ian Wilson. Now is the time for the organization to spend less time on its internal preoccupations and to look outwards. Without neglecting internal reforms, we need to concentrate on changes in our societies and partnerships, alliances and relationship building.

 

How can we meet the major challenges of our time? With which organisations do we need to form partnerships? What are our unique selling points? And what are we seeking from potential partners? We need to have very convincing answers to all of these questions if the ICA's voice is to be heard loud and clear on an international stage that is increasingly congested with so many actors, all striving to make themselves heard.

 

During the last sixty years ICA played a crucial role in promoting professional cooperation across political and religious divides. As the ICA matured and its small, originally Eurocentric membership grew to encompass most of the world and became more fully aware of the archival needs of that world, a gradual exponential expansion of ICA's substantive activities occurred in an effort to discharge the council's responsibilities more adequately to the global archival profession as a whole. This global network must be able to face the challenges of the worldwide "infocracy" we are living in.

 

Now we meet to face the challenges of the worldwide "infocracy" we live in. Today, power increasingly resides in the hands of those who hold information and who can manage it effectively. Information is an asset that is every bit as important as land, water, fuel and other natural resources. Of course we all come from different countries and cultures, but we live in an archival world without borders, the worldwide web. We just need an international context to do our work in.

It makes very little sense to respond to the challenges of the digital revolution and the worldwide web only at a national level. By their very nature, these developments do not respect national frontiers. The ICA is uniquely well placed to help develop international approaches that respect linguistic and cultural diversity.

 

What could be done during my 2 years term as your President? What can we do as ICA's leadership?

Let's try to be humble and modest.

 

First of all we have to continue the modernisation of our network. We are a huge organization, but sometimes we act like we were the Round Table of national archivists in the nineteen-fifties. Some traces of those days haven't left our Constitution yet. We need to develop structures which are more flexible and less bureaucratic. We have to change the financial structure: we should become less dependent on the biggest national archives and create for our AGM a system of "One fee, one vote". I am happy that French government officials when I visited them last week reaffirmed their strong willingness to  support our Headquarters in Paris.

 

Il me semble aussi que notre approche deviendra de plus en plus une approche decentralisée : nos branches régionales et nos sections sont en effet au coeur de l'ICA. Dans cette perspective, je pense que nous pouvons adopter davantage de langues de travail et ainsi devenir plus efficaces encore pour tous nos membres. Je me dois bien sûr de conserver l'anglais et le francais comme langues de travail de notre organisation, même si mes interventions en tant que Président seront plus souvent en anglais qu'en francais. Je vous promets d'essayer de faire tous les efforts possibles pour laisser mon néerlandais de coté.

 

I think our approach will become more and more a decentralised one: regional branches and sections are the heart of ICA. In this decentralised approach we can adopt more working languages and become more effective for all members.

I am committed to maintaining English and French as the working languages of the organization, tough my performance as your President on stage will be more in English than in French. I do promise to skip my Dutch as much as I can.

 

However, we need to provide much more content in the other world languages, especially Spanish, Arab, Russian and Chinese. This must also extend to other languages that have a great regional importance, for example German here in Europe and Japanese in Asia. I should also stress that this is by no means an exhaustive list, because archive professionals on the ground usually work in their own native language rather than one that they have learnt;

 

The Executive Board has approved last Sunday a plan for an evaluation of CITRA. Do we need to have a CITRA year by year? Should we develop a more open agenda for effective meetings in the regions to carry forward our program? Many of our existing members would appreciate the opportunity to attend more ICA events, perhaps with a regional focus, rather than have to wait patiently for a Congress every four years.

 

For something else: the secretariat in Paris is doing a great job but should in my view be less burdened by bureaucratic governance and take on a more strategic role in helping to build partnerships. Let Paris be the eyes and ears of our network in the world outside. Partnership building is a crucial part of our outside-in approach. We need to cultivate or strengthen partnerships with international organizations (UNESCO, UN Development Programme, Human Rights Commission, OECD, World Bank, IMF) at a variety of levels and the Secretariat is best placed to provide the necessary impetus and coordination.

 

With the help and support of many others in the ICA, the secretariat has developed the new website as the organization's major communication tool. It will remain responsible for ensuring that the ICA capitalises on the latest technologies. However, if the ICA is to become THE information hub for the global archival community, it needs the active and constant participation of ICA members around the world, all of whom I now encourage to add new content. The regional branches and sections also have a major role to play in improving communications and strengthening the network.

 

Dear friends, I would like to see politicians give more support to the archives. When we implement the Universal Declaration on Archives (UDA) that we have to approve today, we should not preach to those who are already converted, but target the decision makers who allocate the resources to the archive institutions and to the programmes in which we should play a part. We should also make much more of International Archives Day as a way of raising the awareness of archives among the general public. Many of our fellow citizens still do not appreciate that archives play a fundamental role in transparency and accountability, in the protection of citizen's rights and in safeguarding social memory. We MUST put this right.

ICA is the only organisation having the power to do this as it is an impartial, worldwide NGO, with a professional and not a political focus, as the director-general of the National Archives of Algeria stated the day before yesterday.

 

Therefore the ICA should be considered a key partner for international organizations such as UNESCO and World Bank when it comes to emergency and post-conflict situations where archives and records management are at stake. We are there in Haïti and should be there in the future. But we also have to join with records managers, museums, libraries, IT companies and worldwide information platforms. Let's not be precious about the professional boundaries in the areas where we should work closely with colleagues in related professions. And we need to develop our links with the private sector that largely manages its records without any reference to the ICA. We are lucky to have SBL, our section for business and labour archives. I think their strategic position is vital for the next period.

 

What about daring to measure ourselves against international standards, by working within the OECD-framework. That organization "provides a setting where governments compare policy experiences, seek answers to common problems, identify good practice and coordinate domestic and international policies.' If we want to be on the political agenda we have to deal with mutual examination by governments, multilateral surveillance and a peer review process through which the performance of individual countries is monitored by their peers, all carried out at committee level. This has had enormous effects in other environments like science policy and could be very helpful for developing countries. The PARBICA Recordkeeping for good governance Toolkit is an excellent example of our contribution to good governance in developing countries. This is the power of ICA.

 

In conclusion

Do I expect the ICA to solve all our problems? No.

But I do think that the ICA can be very helpful to all archivists and leaders of our institutions in strengthening their position and independence in their countries, regions, companies, cities and organizations.

 

Do I expect archivists to solve all problems of the information society? No.

But I do think that we are good partners for politicians, information and records managers, journalists, researchers, librarians, web developers and citizens. We therefore have to be open minded and willing to learn from each other.

We will have to broaden our focus in the coming years, present ourselves more often to the outside world and move forward together in order to strengthen the position of the archives. Let's keep in mind the wake up call of Dirk Graswinckel in 1953: ‘An archivist is someone who first of all thinks of the future'.