The ICA: Catalyst of International Archival Cooperation and Promotion

Abstract

International archival cooperation before World War I1 was limited to rare ventures such as the project launched between the two wars to publish a regional guide to archives in Europe.Archivists and librarians were considered together in 1910 at the first World Congress held in Brussels but the intergovernmental arrangements of the post-war League of Nations had virtually no repercussion on archival matters.It was only the strong impetus towards building a new global order, based on a world-wide partnership institutionalised in the United Nations (UN), which induced some systematic action in the essentially institutional, regional and national world of archival organisation.IN 1946, Solon J. Buck, then Archivist of the United States and President of the Society of American Archivists, initiated an international archival programme structure.Its two main components were the creation of the UN's own archives in New York and the founding of an international organisation for archivists to be associated as a "non-governmental organisation" with the United Nations Educational and Scientific Organisation (UNESCO).The idea behind the UN archives, that its many services should have one great archival agency, was not realised but Buck's second programme element did not become viable.'In May 1948, a committee of experts2 was convened by UNESCO in Paris and declared itself the constituent assembly of an International Council on Archives, under a provisional constitution.3The First International Congress on Archives, metting in Paris in 1950, formed the Council and ruled that an international congress would meet every three years (changed in 1956 to a four year interval).Charles Braibant, France's Director-General of Archives in 1954, decided that an annual Round Table on Archives should be convened, except for the year in which the Congress met.Whereas Congress is intended to be an open gathering of the world-wide profession and aimed at discussing topics of general interest on the basis of reports and lectures, the Round Table meetings are mostly attended 1 It took until 1976 to create a mechanism, ultimately a section of the ICA, to consider the archives of international organisations. 2 The committee of experts consisted of Solon J. Buck and Herbert 0. Breyer (USA), Charles Samaram and Eugene Martin-Chabot (France), Hilary Jenkinson (UK), Julio Jiminez Rueda (Mexico), Emilio Re (Italy), D.P.M. Graswinckel (Netherlands), Vaclav Husak (USSR), and 0. Steinnes (Norway).3 See ICA Directory (1978): 35-44, for the most recent version of the constitution approved on 29 September 1976.

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