We did our session “Activism in the Archives: Working with Human Rights Collections” on Saturday. Patrick Stawski is the Human Rights Archivist at the Archive of Human Rights at Duke University. Patrick spoke about developing the collection there, and the importance of outreach and engagement. The AHR is now the home of the International Monitor Institute, an effort founded by Pippa Scott in the 1990s to support the work of criminal tribunals by collecting, organizing and indexing video evidence of human rights violations in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Iraq, and Burma. Read more at the Archive’s new website:
http://library.duke.edu/specialcollections/human-rights/index.html
Csaba Szilagyi of the Open Society Archives (and recently of Columbia University) spoke about transformations in human rights archives in the past few years due to new technologies and other developments. OSA recently collaborated with the Swedish Institute on a virtual, interactive exhibit in Second Life called Raoul Wallenberg’s Office, which features audio, links and virtual artifacts about Wallenberg, but also allows ‘visitars’ to interact with each other. http://www.osaarchivum.org/beta/secondlife/
Patrick, Grace, Csaba
There was much more, of course, but the common theme for me was archives as conscious and deliberate agents of change and justice-seeking, through outreach and engagement in both new forms and old.