International Council of Archives

Message from the Chair to all SLA members  

Dear Colleagues,

This message concerns the CITRA (annual meeting of the International Council of Archives - ICA) to be held in Toledo, Spain, in the week of 24-28 October 2011.  Its principal purposes are to establish which members of the Section for Archives of Literature and Art (SLA) hope to be in attendance in Toledo and to seek volunteers (by self-nomination) to serve on the committee of SLA from the autumn of 2011 to the autumn of 2015.

The SLA was formally reconstituted and recognised as a full Section at last year's ICA AGM (in Oslo, September 2010).  It was agreed in Oslo that SLA should hold its first plenary session in Toledo and should there elect its committee for a four-year period.  A plenary session for SLA has therefore been reserved in Toledo, with a probable date of Tuesday 25 October.

The plenary session of SLA in Toledo will have three main roles: (1) to elect a new Section committee to serve until 2015; (2) to review the Section's work-programme and projects in progress; (3) to review the Section's communications and publications, and in particular its web-communication - both on the official ICA website and by informal blogging.

The interim committee which will continue to serve until Toledo is as follows: David Sutton (Chair); Heather Dean (Secretary); Sebastian Gurciullo (webmaster, job-share); Lourdes Fuentes Hashimoto (webmaster, job-share); Jamie Andrews; Helena Leonce.  As far as I know, these six members would be happy to continue to serve on our committee.  The SLA constitution envisages a committee of up to 11 members, including the Chair, Secretary and Webmaster(s).

At the time of the re-establishment of SLA, the following work-programme was agreed:

• World-wide Directory of Repositories holding Literary Archives
• Literary copyright
• Correspondence within literary archives
• "How to use" project for users of literary archives
• Collecting policies
• Diverse international locations ("diasporic" literary archives)
• Electronic media and born-digital literary archives

Good progress has been made on the World-Wide Directory, and a version (unfinished but substantial) can be consulted at http://www.ica.org/2908/useful-links-collections/worldwide-directory-of-repositories-holding-literary-archives.html.  The proposed SLA project on literary copyright has probably been superseded by the new SLA-led ICA Working Group on Copyright.  The other components of the work-programme are for discussion and confirmation in Toledo, as the basis for the Section's activities in the period 2011-2015.

I should be grateful if you could let me know, first, whether you are likely to be able to attend the meeting in Toledo and, second, whether you would like to put forward your name as a member of the next SLA Committee.

Please reply to me at ; do not Reply To All.

With best wishes to all colleagues,

David Sutton, Chair

ICA Section for Archives of Literature and Art