Introduction

Girona 2014: One Conference, Three Events

Girona City Council, through its Municipal Archive, is hosting and organizing the 2nd Annual Conference of the International Council on Archives, which will be held in October 2014, as approved by the General Assembly of the International Council on Archives, which met on the 24th of August 2012 in the Australian city of Brisbane.

This event will coincide with the celebration of the 9th European Conference on Archives (ECA), organized every four years by the European Branch of the International Council on Archives (EURBICA).

Also taking place at the same time is the 13th Image and Research Seminar, organized biennially by the Centre for Image Research and Diffusion (CRDI) of Girona City Council in conjunction with the Archivists Association of Catalonia (AAC), which will mainly focus on photographic and audiovisual documents.

All three events are grouped under a common title: Archives and Cultural Industries, in order to foster debate on a key issue for archives: the potential for the documentation that has been conserved in them to be a resource provider for the creation and consumption of culture among the population.

Archives and Cultural Industries

Archives around the world house a tremendous amount of textual, graphic, cartographic, photographic and audiovisual documents that make up the material with which mankind's collective memory has been constructed. Archives have traditionally been responsible for conserving and organizing this documentation in order to meet the needs of public administration and facilitate historical research. In addition to this, however, the documentation kept in archives may have other uses, such as the creation of consumer products in the cultural sphere.

The digitization of collections of documents has allowed the creation of multiple cultural resources accessible through the Internet and other communication networks that can be a focal point of interest to businesses and consumers. We must, therefore, be aware of the potential of this documentation to meet the needs of those agents that generate cultural products and consumer demands among the population.

Hence innovative strategies must be established in both the treatment and organization of documentation and its dissemination and exploitation, in legal ways that respect intellectual property rights, and which ultimately reassess the role of archives in the Information and Knowledge Society.

This is one of the objectives of the Archives Conference, organized by the ICA (EURBICA) and the Municipal Archive of Girona, which will be held in the city of Girona in 2014.

The Conference will focus the discussion on these issues from three perspectives:

The perspective of content: How should collections of documents be organized, described, digitized and disseminated to facilitate access and enhance their value.
The perspective of cultural industries: What are the new businesses dealing with the creation and distribution of digital content and how can collaboration between the public and private sectors be articulated to advance business creation.
The perspective of the general population: What are its interests and cultural consumption habits, and what future trends may arise.