Ref. Ares(2017)2251570 - 02/05/2017

EUROPEAN COMMISSION Secretariat-General

Directorate B - Institutional and Administrative Policies SG.B.1-Corporate Management, Budget and Administration

Brussels, SG.DSG2.B1/JG/JS

EUROPEAN ARCHIVES GROUP / EUROPEAN BOARD OF NATIONAL ARCHIVISTS JOINT MEETING BRATISLAVA, 28 NOVEMBER 2016

MINUTES

The meeting was co-chaired by Maria Spankova of the Ministry of the Interior of the Slovak Republic and Julien Guerrier of the .

1. Opening and announcements

The participants were welcomed by Mária Mrižová, Interim Director, Department of Archives and Registries, Ministry of the Interior and Adrián Jenčo, Director General of Public Administration Section, Ministry of the Interior.

2. Adoption of the Agenda

A short update by regarding the recent developments in EURBICA was added to the agenda under "point 8. Updates".

The minutes of the last meeting were approved without comments and will be made available on the Europa website.

3. e-Archiving, Data Protection and EU Projects (10:00)

The three themes that had been considered most important at the meeting in The Hague in June 2016, i.e. eArchiving, Data Protection and EU projects, were on the agenda for further action. The e-Archiving discussion was prepared by the UK and the DLM Forum. , with assistance from Germany, had prepared a draft proposal for a Code of Conduct for Archives Services for data protection that had been circulated to the participants ahead of the meeting. Slovenia had prepared an introduction for the third subgroup on EU projects.

The discussions took place in subgroups after which the results were presented in plenary session. Each subgroup produced a short overview of the main issues and some conclusions, including open questions and proposed next steps.

 eArchiving: There is a paradigm shift to digital archiving which is generating a revolution in the way archivists are trained and archives are processed. What does

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the international archival community need to do to cope with this fundamental shift?

a) The subgroup will draft recommendations to the Commission on e- Archiving and define concrete areas of action for the EAG. b) A first draft with ideas for discussion and further development will be circulated by the UK.

 A code of conduct for European Archives Services on data protection will be developed in accordance with article 40 of the new General Regulation on Data Protection (Regulation 2016/679), which provides that it may ultimately be adopted by the Commission as an implementing act. a) A new version (0.3) of the draft takes account of the discussion in Bratislava and will be circulated to EAG members for further comments. b) A subsequent version 0.4 will be more widely circulated to other interested bodies (e.g. associations of archivists) at the beginning of 2017. c) A consolidated draft 1.0 will be submitted to the EAG in Malta for discussion.

 EU projects: there were differing expectations in the group. Marens Engelhard (NL) argued for a pragmatic approach. He suggested to focus on the further development of APEF as a vehicle for further action and suggested to delay any conclusions until after discussion had taken place in EBNA and APEF on a possible project proposal by APEF.

6. Digitisation for Disposal: round table and discussion

István Kecskeméti (FI), director of Collection management at the Finnish National Archives, gave an introduction setting out the main issues and describing the situation in Finland. This was followed by short presentations from Belgium, France, Luxembourg and . The main issue is to guarantee the legal value and the authenticity, integrity and historical value of the digitised documents. In Finland changes in the archives law have created the possibility to eliminate originals of digitised documents under certain conditions. This is being discussed in some other countries but has not yet been implemented there. During the discussion it became apparent that the business case for digitisation for disposal, i.e. whether it can be cost effective taking into account the costs of digital versus other forms of storage, a reduction in onsite consultation facilities, etc., is not yet clear.

7. Commemoration of the abolition of the death penalty (1867) in

Silvestre Lacerda (PT) gave a presentation of the activities to commemorate the abolition of the death penalty in Portugal in 1867. He invited his colleagues of the other National Archives of the EU Member States to establish cooperation protocols to build a broad and integrated vision of the common values in and to provide material related to the abolition of the death penalty process in their own countries for an exhibition in in May 2018.

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8. Update EU-projects (Archives Portal; e-ARK; DLM Forum)

 Arjan Agema (NL), chair of the Archives Portal Europe Foundation reported that the Archives Portal Europe Foundation is up and running smoothly. The foundation is cooperating closely with NANETH and Europeana and had a positive result of €170.000 in 2016. The portal provides access to more a quarter billion archival descriptions from almost 7 thousand archival institutions. APEF is optimistic about the possibility to receive future EU funding.

 Zoltán Szatuscek (HU), chair of the DLM Forum, reported that following the The Hague meeting the DLM Forum has undertaken to work more closely with the EAG. This resulted in the paper prepared by DLM for the eArchiving discussion. He reported that the eArk project was coming to conclusion and noted that it is especially important to see how the project output will be sustained after the end of EU funding.

 Karin Van Honacker (BE) reported that a new board of EURBICA (European Branch of the International Council on Archives) had been elected in June. Following a survey of its members, EURBICA will focus on disseminating information about e.g., professional events, training and funding opportunities, organising workshops and conferences and promoting co-cooperative projects.

9. Participation of third countries in the EAG – proposal from the Commission

The EAG is a Commission expert group and is subject to the rules for such groups. For a number of years EAG meetings were organised jointly with EBNA. As a consequence some non-EU countries and other organisations participated in the meetings. In order to bring the running of the group in line with its rules, the Commission proposed to:  nominate Norway, Iceland and Switzerland to participate in the EAG as observers;  nominate EURBICA to participate in the EAG as an observer  nominate the EU Historical Archives at the European University Institute in Florence to join the EAG as an observer.

The criteria for granting observer status can be found in Article 16 of the Commission Decision establishing horizontal rules on the creation and operation of Commission expert groups.

The meeting agreed to give observer status to the National Archives of Iceland, the National Archives, the Swiss Federal Archives, EURBICA and the EU Historical Archives in Florence.

5. Update activities EAG subgroup and renewal subgroup

The membership of the programme and coordination sub-group needed to be renewed. The subgroup was created in 2014 and the two year term of its members had expired. The current, former and next EU presidencies are ex officio members. In the first semester of 2017 this will be the Slovak Republic, Malta and Estonia. a) The meeting re-appointed Josée Kirps as (co-)chair of the subgroup.

3 b) Members of the EAG who wish to volunteer to participate in the subgroup should do so no later than 3 January 2017.

The subgroup usually has one physical meeting per semester, usually in . The next meeting of the subgroup will likely take place in the second half of January 2017. It is possible to arrange for participation by video- or teleconference. Most of the work of the subgroup takes place by email.

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