Sonderband 2. International Council on Archives. Dritte Europäische Archivkonferenz, Wien 11. bis 15. Mai 1993. Tagungsprotokolle (1996)
4. Session / Séance. Strategies for Links with Historical Research / Stratégies de Communication envers la Recherche historique - Discussion / Interventions
4. Session/Séance: Discussion - Interventions ries. The system has been clearly prepared for historical archives and not for libraries, but the „image part“ of the system is perfectly for the use in libraries, over all for documents, manuscripts, illuminated manuscripts, etc. In addition we cooperate with UNESCO, e. g. for the ICA project Memory of the World. The other entities, Fondaciôn Ramon Areces and IBM Spain are very interested in the interdissemination of the system. They signed a temporary agreement with El Corte Inglès, a big store and really the most important private firm in Spain, in order to continue research and dissemination of the system. In consequence it is possible that the Ministry of Culture contributes the system (e. g. to the University of Salamanca) and IBM and El Corte Inglès make the installation of the system and the necessary adaptations. At this moment, the system is really functioning in the archives - we have completed the archives of Indias with more than 4 000 000 pages of these archives -, and we daily serve more than 100 disks, optical disks in the reading room, where some days almost all the 20 user stations are being used; we expect that this number will increase in the future because we continue to scan and we continue the job of extending the scanning process because some of documents relating to America never went to Sevilla. Ivar Fonnes: The presentation of Mr. Gonzalez opened some interesting perspectives, i. e. the possibility of European cooperation on making data bases: I mean national data bases describing archives and their holdings, different kind of finding aids, etc. I think there ought to be a lot of benefits on international cooperation in this field: Cooperation on the definition of description standards is one important thing, another one, how to create the architecture and design of those data bases. Archives, I think, must be able to make their information available outside reading rooms, for instance to Universities. A further interesting perspective is to have the possibility to search in a data base about archives’ holdings in other countries which might interest me or a Norwegian historian. This future perspective reduces the importance of „physical“ exchange of archival material. Pedro Gonzalez: Of course, every effort on the way to standardization will be very, very useful. Some of our data bases, e. g. the data base for the history of Italy, of the history of Science has been agreed with Italian colleagues, but in general we don’t have common standards and, at best, we are at the beginning of standardization of the description. The data bases of the Centro de Informaciôn Documental are prepared with an application of STAIRS and are not very useful at this moment, but it is possible to get access by the international line, through normal telephone lines. In the Ministerio de Cultura we get a new equipment and we hope to have a more user-friendly interface (with Videotext). In the case of the Archivo General de Indias, we don’t have any standard, but we have clear conditions concerning the quality of the screen and the quality of the equipment unit. Paule René-Bazin: J’avais une question à poser à propos du coût de l’accès à cettes bases de données. Traditionnellement l’accès aux documents est gratuit. Est-ce que vous avez envisagé de faire payer l’accès à cettes bases de données, ou non, parce que c’est une question que nous nous posons beaucoup,. non pas pour des 370
