by Marie Villemin and April Miller 

The Section for Archivists of Internal Organizations of the ICA held its 34th meeting in Kuala Lumpur on Friday July 25th. Many reports were made on the administration, finance and activity programme of the section, and the members were treated to several presentations from outside the Section, including Mr. Ian Wilson (incoming President of the ICA) and Ineke Deserno (ICA Programme Committee.) Both Mr. Wilson and Ms. Deserno invited the SIO to think creatively about the upcoming activity programme so as to situate its work within the strategic direction of the ICA at large.

The activity programme for 2008-2012 consists of several items:

• Update and develop the Guide to the Archives of International Organizations. A new website has been developed to launch a new version of the Guide, which is hosted on the UNESCO Archives website. One of the next activities for the Section will be to seek other international organizations who may wish to add to the Guide.
• Develop tools for effective internal communication within the Section, in particular by updating and developing the SIO website.
• Extend the membership of the section by including, in particular, more members from other regions outside Western Europe and North America.
• Collaborate with the ICA Secretariat to welcome new members into the Section and to increase communication on the topic of international organizations.
• Closely follow technological developments with respect to archives and records management within international organizations.
• Organize workshops and training sessions at the annual meetings to support professional development in core areas such as technological development, electronic records archiving and development of standards.
• Prepare a toolkit for archivists and records managers in international organizations on best practices for archiving websites. This toolkit shall include standards, procedures and guidelines and will take into consideration the results of a survey on archiving of websites completed by SIO members in 2008. A workshop will be organized to address this topic, and the members hope that the toolkit will be useful for all archivists around the world.
• Promote collaboration with researchers in the field of international relations and exchange experiences from ongoing history projects within member organizations.
• A workshop on access will be organized in Geneva. The idea for this workshop came from the discussions at the Nairobi meeting in 2007, with a view to establish best practices and recommendations on access to archives in international organizations. This will not only help with access to holdings by internal staff, but may also increase access to holdings by external researchers.
• Cooperate internationally to improve the preservation of, and access to, archival holdings that are of particular importance for the international community, such as archives documenting human rights.
  

The Section is looking forward to pursuing these activities with the new SIO Board that was recently elected for the 2008 – 2012 term. For more information about the Section for Archivists of International Organizations visit the website at: www.unesco.org/webworld/ica_sio