Sonderband 2. International Council on Archives. Dritte Europäische Archivkonferenz, Wien 11. bis 15. Mai 1993. Tagungsprotokolle (1996)
3. Session / Séance. Sharing of Experience and Exchange of Staff / Partage d’Expériences et Echange des Personnes - Huyda, Richard: Coordination Research in Archival Sience and Dissemination of Professional Information / Coordination de la recherche en archivistique et diffusion de l’information professionnelle (english 231 - français 251)
expertise to fully assume their roles and responsibilities. When they are not organized for strictly training purposes, these events still always offer a chance to bring together people with varied expertise and experience to exchange their viewpoints on the great problems of the day. They promote the burgeoning and confrontation of new ideas, concepts or approaches, while expanding participants’ perspectives. Though the publications and the lectures organized by some professional groups ensure adegree of research coordination, can we speak of coordination in these activities themselves? At this moment, we are at the very start of a new era in this field. In fact, we saw a premiere last year in terms of organizing group sessions for the members of the various national professional associations with the annual meetings of the Association des archivistes du Québec, the Canadian Archivists Association and the Society of American Archivists, which were all held in Montreal after the Congress of the International Council of Archives. In one of these conferences, moreover, Gérard Thibault of the Association des archivistes français informed us of the various attempts at cooperation that the editors of the large European scholarly reviews in archival science have worked and are continuing to work on. In short, there is reason to hope that the fiiture holds much for us in the area of coordinated professional information through our professional associations, their publications and their scientific conferences. National and international archive Networks and their representative bodies First, it should be emphasized that coordination of research in archival science and the dissemination of professional information are superimposed on national archival systems. The more decision making is centralized in these systems, the more the mechanisms for coordinating research and distributing professional information will feel the effects of this centralization. On the other hand, the less centralization there is, the less chance our means of action and controlling research, as well as our means of distributing professional information, will have of benefiting from a centralizing authority. The fact is that coordination, which presupposes a certain ordering of the parts of a whole under a logical plan, will be more or less rigid or flexible depending on the degree of centralization in the archival systems set up in each country. In Canada, archival institutions have always enjoyed a high degree of autonomy. In fact, it was only with the creation of the Canadian Council of Archives barely 7 or 8 years ago that we saw the beginning of an effort and a determination to improve the coordination of research in archival science. The Canadian Council of Archives was itself, however, the result of a lengthy maturing process. As Jean-Pierre Wallot has described it27, the period before the 3. Session/Séance: Marcoux - Huyda, Coordinating Research in archivai Science 27 Wallot, Jean-Pierre: Le CCA et le Congrès du CIA de 1992: produits de 15 ans d’évolution de la communauté archivistique canadienne, [Ottawa]: 14 février 1991, p. 3. 241
