As we have previously announced, the four-yearly ICA Congress in Abu Dhabi has been rescheduled from November 2020 to October 2021, as a result of the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic.
Planning is now proceeding for the Congress – the most important event in ICA’s calendar. The proceedings will take place from 19–22 October 2021, with governance meetings (including Section meetings) taking place in the days before the Congress opens.
ICA’s officers have decided that all governance changes previously expected to take place at the 2020 Congress will be deferred to the 2021 Congress – including, for Sections, the assumption of new roles for the Section Chair, Section Secretary and Section Committee.
New Chair and Committee for SLA from 2021
From the 2021 Congress, the new Chair (sometimes called President) of SLA will be Heather Dean, presently our Section Secretary. Heather is Associate Director of Special Collections in the Library of the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. She will assume her new role at the end of the Abu Dhabi Congress, but in the meantime would be delighted to hear from SLA members with their thoughts about the future of the Section. Heather can be contacted though her University of Victoria profile.
The new SLA Committee from 2021 – elected, co-opted and announced at the end of last year – will be as follows:
Leonor Calvão Borges
Fatoumata Cissé Diara
Heather Dean
André Derval
Sebastian Gurciullo
Catherine Hobbs
Veno Kauaria
Annantonia Martorano
David Sutton
Also in Abu Dhabi …
We will hold a Section Meeting for SLA in Abu Dhabi if enough SLA members indicate that they are going to attend in person. In the meantime we will be considering the possibilities for organising a videoconference meeting early in 2021, to look ahead to Abu Dhabi and beyond.
The new Section for Archives and Human Rights (SAHR) will have a number of highlights in Abu Dhabi, including the launch of the new book on Archives and Human Rights, to be published by Routledge; the launch of a new edition of the ICA journal Comma, also devoted to archives and human rights; and a programme session on Safe Havens for Archives at Risk, with speakers Afelonne Doek of Amsterdam, Didier Grange of Geneva, and David Sutton, the outgoing Chair/President of SLA.