This year, the Sections, with welcome help from the Branches and a number of New Professionals, ran the ICA stall at the Girona Conference. It helped that we were given pole position by the Conference organisers and that the stall had a full set of facilities: a large screen, a computer and leaflet stands. The new ICA banner, with images drawn from our International Archives Day website, had pride of place.

We decided to focus on a few key ICA activities:
1.      The work of the Archives and Human Rights working group.
2.      Preparations for International Archives Day 2015, about which we will be circulating more information in the New Year – watch out for it.
3.      The forthcoming conference in Reykjavik in 2015 and Congress in Seoul in 2016
4.      ICA and its publications, particularly COMMA and Flash
5.      The work of ICA’s sections and branches
This approach paid off: there were times when the space was full to capacity, particularly at tea breaks. Later in the afternoons, as things quietened down, colleagues from all around the globe sat around the small table and put the archival world to rights.
The issues raised with us at the stall ranged from the constitutional (How do I get my voting papers for the General Assembly meeting?) to the professional (Will ICA be publishing the Multi Lingual Archival Terminology directory in Arabic and Farsi?) to the practical (Can I leave my suitcase here while I get a map of Girona?). However, the most discussed topic was International Archive Day 2014. The website (which attracted some 1,566,845 hits in June) was readily available on the big screen and a number of delegates wanted a photograph of the entry their service had submitted ahead of 9 June 2014.
We are hoping that the ICA budgets next year will allow for a bigger and better space and are already collecting additional ideas for the stall. We intend to offer a message board for individuals and an advertising space for the organisers of regional conferences.
So many of you helped with the stall that it would not be possible to thank everyone by name: we are sincerely grateful to all of you, all the same.  However, we would like to mention Nathalie Florent from the ICA Secretariat for very prompt responses to our requests and Laurence Ward from London Metropolitan Archives for the work he did on the banner.
Don’t miss the stall in Reykjavik next year – and bring your leaflets and promotional material too!
Deborah Jenkins, Section for Local, Municipal and Territorial Archives