First Conference on the Archives of Slavic Countries, Lipica, Slovenia, 8-10 Oct 2010
The First Conference on the Archives of Slavic Countries was held in Lipica, Slovenia, 8-10 October 2010.
The Conference was organized with the support of the Forum of Slavic Cultures (Slovenia), the Ministry of High Education, Science and Technology of the Republic of Slovenia, the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia, the State Archives of Trieste (Italy), and the Society of Historians and Archivists of Slovenia. The financial support was provided by the Directorate of State Archives, Ministry of Culture of Italy.
The organizational committee included members of the International Institute for Archival Science of Trieste and Maribore, P. Klasinc (Slovenia, director of the IIAS), M. Larin (Russia, director of the Russian Research Institute of Documentation and Archival Science), J. Hanus (Slovakia, director at the Department of Archives and Registries, Ministry of the Interior of the Slovak Republic), A. Rybakov (Belarus, director of the Belarusian Research Institute of Records Management and Archival Studies), М. Marosz (Poland, director at the State Archives of Cracow).
The topic of the conference: “Current Issues of Archival Theory and Practice”. The conference participants represented 12 out of 13 slavic countries: Belarus, Bulgaria, Bosnia- Herzegovina, Macedonia, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Serbia, Ukraine, Croatia and Montenegro.
In view of close cultural traditions and languages in the member countries, the conference reports were delivered in the national languages. The Belarusian side offered a report on the topic «Issues of the formation of national legislation as a basis for management of archives and records in the Republic of Belarus” to address the main aspects and principles of development of archival legislation, problems and complexities in this work, possible ways of their solution.
The reports analysis showed that most archival problems appeared to be common for all slavic countries, including in particular:
– the development of unified national archival legislation;
– the formation of archives management system, definition of archives types, their legal status, centralization of archives management;
– system of relationships between state archival agencies and institutions and non-government institutions;
– preservation of archival documents, search of areas, construction of buildings and facilities for records storage;
– scholarly and procedural support of archival business, including the development of principles and methods of work with electronic records and their archival storage;
– professional training;
– financing of archives, social protection of archivists, increasing the level of their salaries.
For more information on the conference, see the Russian-language version of the website.