Sonderband 2. International Council on Archives. Dritte Europäische Archivkonferenz, Wien 11. bis 15. Mai 1993. Tagungsprotokolle (1996)
1. Session / Séance. Experiences gained, current Situation, future Prospects / Expériences acquises, Situation actuelle, Perspectives futures - Hall, Kenneth: Perspectives opened up by the Maastricht Symposium / Perspectives ouvertes par le Symposium de Maastricht (english 41 - français 48)
1. Session/Séance: Hall, Maastricht Symposium relaxed and in formal debate in between the ,formai4 sessions and this was, perhaps, one of the most striking and successful features of the Maastricht Symposium. The theme of the conference was pursued through five plenary sessions of only one hour in length, each comprising two keynote papers. Each plenary was succeeded, after a long coffee, break by six or seven concurrent sessions dealing with subthemes, each by means of at least two, ten minute papers followed by informal debate from the floor. Because of this structure no participant could attend all sessions and following each plenary it was necessary to choose which aspect of the topic identified in the keynote papers one wished to pursue in the smaller group. Many of those who attended Maastricht were struck by the fact that there was remarkably little absenteeism1 from the sessions. Indeed one even saw on a number of occasions that so called accompanying persons1 found themselves abandoning their own programmes because they felt inclined to attend a sessions and, in some cases, join in the debate. VAN was the organising host, but from the beginning it had chosen to encourage members of other professional associations to participate in the planning and promotion of the Maastricht Symposium. Practising archivists from Europe and further afield were encouraged to attend in their own right, rather than just as representatives of their employing institutions and pre-publicity was provided at the preceding annual conferences of archival associations in Europe and North America. In many cases those who attended Maastricht financed themselves. Potential speakers and chairmen, themes and sub-themes were identified initially by a panel consisting of three representatives of VAN together with three consultants1 drawn from archival associations in Germany, France and the United Kingdom. Although geographical spread was a consideration, the main preoccupation of the panel was to identify those with current expertise within the chosen subject and to provide avariety of views and experience, and some controversy. Care was also taken, in several cases and especially for the parallel sessions, to invite speakers who were not the directors of a service or institution, in order to encourage the airing of ideas of those unburdened by management responsibilities. This was also seen, potentially, as a way of enabling participants to feelless inhibited in debate. In agreeing with, or challenging a speaker they would not feel that they were necessarily challenging authority. Three conference languages, German, French and English were selected, with simultaneous translation for the plenary sessions and half of the parallel sessions. Pure economics ruled out the inclusion of more languages, and Dutch was deliberately omitted in order to avoid domination of the debate by participants from the host country who were not proficient in at least one of the conference languages. This was a brave choice. It was also necessary in some of the parallel sessions to have single language groups in order to effect further economies. The papers presented in the plenary sessions were intended to set the scene for debate later. The subsequent parallel sessions were each presented with two short papers, often designed to present contrasting or opposing views, in order to stimulate 42
