Report on the EASTICA Executive Board Meeting and Seminar in Beijing, China
Executive board meeting and a seminar of the East Asian Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives (EASTICA) was held in Beijing, China from December 15 through 18, 2014. The event successfully had about 100 audiences participating mainly from EASTICA board member countries/territories.
The event was kicked off with the executive board meeting on December 15. The main topic on the agenda was the finance of EASTICA and the Postgraduate Certificate in Archival Studies Program, which EASTICA had been organizing jointly with the University of Hong Kong for years. Also reported was a plan to build a new EASTICA website. In addition, it was formally agreed that next EASTICA meeting would be held in Fukuoka, Japan in October 2015, and that of 2016 should be scheduled to coincide with the ICA Congress in Seoul, Korea in September 2016.
The following two days were made up of professional contents. Seminar on December 16 and 17 was under the theme of "A Challenge to the Archives Profession - Crisis or Opportunity." Given this, China, Japan, Korea, Macau and Mongolia presented country/territory reports on their recent efforts in the fields such as professional development and digitization of records. Other invited presentations included the following:
-"Bracing for Bit and Bytes: Confronting the Digital Challenge to the Archival Profession," by Nathan Moles, University of Toronto
-"Challenge and Opportunity to the Archival Work Brought by the Informationization Development," by Heshun Lu, Beijing Municipal Archives
-"Reorganization of the National Archives and Directions of its Operation: Horizontal Accountability and Pluralism," by Pr. Kun-Hong Kwak, Hannam University Graduate School
-"Professionalism versus Amateurism: A Hong Kong Case Study," by Simon F.K. Chu, Hong Kong Archives Society
-"You Can Turn an IT Expert into an Archivist Much More Easily Than You Can Teach an Archivist Technical Expertise," by Margaret Crokett & Margaret Turner, International Council on Archives
In the course of the program, participants visited the Beijing Municipal Archives on December 17, and the National Museum of China on the next day. At the Beijing Municipal Archives, they get briefed on digitization of paper materials and traditional conservation techniques.
* Further details of this EASTICA meeting in Beijing will be reported in No. 55 of our journal "Archives" to be published in February 2015.
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EASTICA executive board meeting
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Presentation by Mr. Moles, University of Toronto
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NAJ staff presenting Japanese country report
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Entrance of the Beijing Municipal Archives
3-2 Kitanomaru Koen, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102-0091
TEL:+81-3-3214-0637