International Programme "Reconstitution of the Memory of
Poland"
PROGRAMME ORIGINS
The Programme initiative
was suggested in 1997 by International
Council on
Archives (ICA), in relation to activities carried out by UNESCO
with the
aim to assess the losses archives worldwide suffered in the 20th
century and the dispersion of their holdings as a result of war,
plunder and
border changes. Polish response to the
UNESCO questionnaire made it clear that Poland had suffered the largest
losses
and was struggling to overcome the largest problems of this kind on a
worldwide
scale. The reaction to this fact the
international community had until then been unaware of, was a proposal
to run
the Programme, treated from its inception as an international
initiative whose
results, including the methodology developed under the Programme, would
be
widely available for use. In 1998 the
Programme was approved by the
Council of Europe.
OBJECTIVE
The fundamental objective
of the programme is to provide information about the sources on the
history of
Poland and the Polish nation over the period 1772 - 1918, and
eventually – also
up to 1945, which is to contribute to obtaining replacement materials
for
documents irrevocably lost by Poland or scattered in other countries’
holdings. Apart from its fundamental
objective, the Programme is also to provide knowledge about the
technical and
organizational capabilities of creating a shared repository of
(meta)data
gathered from different archives.
EXECUTION
By now archive searches
have been carried out in the following countries: Austria, Belarus,
France,
Moldova, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Italy.
It should be noted that in the archives in Russia and Ukraine
the work
was carried out by local archivists, while in the archives of Germany,
Austria
and Belarus – by Polish ones. In the
remaining archives the documents related to Poland are being registered
on the
basis of bilateral agreements. It is
planned that the search in the local (
reguinal ) archives of the participating states will be
intensified and
the search in the archives in Lithuania and Beloeussia will be launched
in the
next Phase of the Programme.
In 2003, Phase One of the
Programme – that is search in central archives – was completed. The descriptions of archival holdings from
Austria, Germany, Ukraine, Italy and France were obtained (data not yet
entered
into the database).
RESULTS
Results of archive searches
carried out by Polish and foreign archivists are organized in the
format of a database
entitled Reconstitution of the Memory of Poland.
PARTIES INVOLVED
The Programme has been
carried out by archivists from Poland and cooperating countries. It is being financed by funds provided by the
Council of Europe, Federal Republic
of
Germany, Austria and Poland. The
Programme has also received support from Die
Robert Bosch Stiftung GmbH and The
Leopold Kronenberg Foundation.
The Programme contents has
been supervised by the Head Office of
State
Archives in Poland – Associate Professor Władysław Stępniak,
Deputy
Director General of State Archives in Poland is Head of the Programme.
The
Internet version of the database has been created with the help of
Warsaw
University’s Interdisciplinary
Centre for
Mathematical and Computational Modelling. The cooperation
with the Warsaw University,
initiated in 2004, is aimed not only at the presentation of current
search
results in the format of on-line database, but also at gathering
experience
with respect to the application of cutting-edge technology for
collecting and
presenting data on archival holdings.
Directions of these changes will also depend on valuable
suggestions and
comments of on-line users. Please send
your comments to the addresses below.
CONTACT
Database contents – Anna Barszcz
Database functionality – Wojtek
Sylwestrzak