Fifth ArchivoyMemoria Conference

Account

5th “ArchivoyMemoria” Conference held

An essential forum for specialists devoted to the recovery of documentary heritage and the preservation of historical memory: this is what the "ArchivoyMemoria” conference, which concluded its fifth edition on 18 February, has once again become. Attended by around 130 people, this interdisciplinary gathering organized by the Railway History Archive (AHF, Archivo Histórico Ferroviario) of the Madrid Railway Museum, belonging to the Spanish Railway Foundation (FFE, Fundación de los Ferrocarriles Españoles) and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas), was held for the first time at the Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences of the CSIC, after four previous editions held at the Palacio de Fernán Núñez, the FFE headquarters.


The fundamental aspiration of the conference, to build bridges amongst professionals from History, Anthropology, Archival Science, Librarianship, Museology, Literature and Communication Sciences, amongst other disciplines, was accomplished when it was announced, given the content of the programme. But that goal was easily achieved, judging by the lively debate generated amongst the documentation and archival science researchers and professionals gathered there, both in the times provided for the exchange of views and in the breaks, in which small groups of specialists formed to continue discussing the various issues addressed in the sessions. There were three of these; Archiving memory: researchers, collectors, scholars and documentary production, focusing on "personal archives" and the various ways of storing and arranging data and processes related to scientific research that may be drawn from the study of this documentation; Current projects, in which ongoing studies were presented regarding documentary production arising from scientific, academic, political or artistic research and Archive Mania: the organization and management of extraordinary document admission, dedicated to the methodological problems posed by archives and collections whose form of incorporation can be described as extraordinary in not being the usual way to transfer documents.

There were also three speakers who enriched the programme with their dissertations, providing their own particular views on the reconstruction of memory from documentary collections: Jorge Martínez Reverte, Verónica Sierra and Manuel Cruz.

As a new feature, this Fifth Conference, which was inaugurated by Eduardo Manzano (Director of the Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences of the CSIC) and Jaime Barreiro (Managing Director of the FFE) and closed by Miguel Muñoz (Director of the Railway Museum), was broadcast live from the Tomás Navarro Tomás library of the CSIC.