As described in earlier posts, SLA has continued to support work being conducted on Archival Safe Havens (cases of archives in extreme danger which may, as a last resort, be physically moved to a safe location or be digitally copied and the copies transferred to a trusted repository).

A successful session on this topic at ICA’s Seoul Congress, chaired by the SLA President, has led to closer engagement of both UNESCO and ICA in this work, and was followed by two practical ‘meetings of experts’ in Berne (October 2016) and Amsterdam (January 2017), convened under the auspices of swisspeace and the International Institute of Social History.

The final outcome paper from the Bern meeting is commended to all SLA members and their archival colleagues. The agenda for the Amsterdam working meeting can be read here.

Although SLA’s work on the archives of dissident authors (see the post by Catherine Hobbs as long ago as August 2012) was one of the starting-points for this “safe haven” work, our President made it clear in Seoul that SLA would no longer seek to develop its own individual project in this area but, rather, would seek to continue this important internationalist initiative as a team-project working with partners from UNESCO, ICA, swisspeace and the Diasporic Literary Archives Network.