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The Eighth World Congress of Archivists will meet in Washington, from September 29 through October 3, 1976. Concurrently with the congress, the Microfilm Committee of the International Council on Archives will be holding its seventh meeting. At the first meeting of the General Assembly of World Archivists, in Paris in 1950, Lester Born, the first general secretary of the International Council on Archives, presented a paper in which he urged archivists to extend their use of microphotography. He pointed to a wide spectrum of uses: microfilm could promote the exchange of documents between archives, it could facilitate scholarly access, and it could enable archives to supplement their own holdings. Born's paper prompted a lively discussion. Although some of the discussants pointed to specific examples in which microfilm had assisted archivists, a few, especially those from France, questioned the permanence of microfilm and the many technical problems which they said made the use of microfilm by archives difficult.1 Although uses of microfilm by archives were reported in Archivum2 and discussed at a number of world congresses, many of the older archival administrations looked upon microfilm as a threat to their exclusive control over the records in their custody. It was not until May 1966, when the Extraordinary Congress of the International Council on Archives met in Washington, that a more mature evaluation of the role that microfilm could play in archives, as well as the beginnings of a consensus, were reached. That Congress had as its theme "Archives for ScholarshipEncouraging Greater Ease of Access." The discussions at Washington led to a number of unprecedented and unanimous recommendations. Some called for a liberalization of restrictions, others called for the strengthening of microfilming programs by extending them whenever possible to entire series of records, and another called for the formation of a committee to investigate the most economical and rapid methods for the publication of archival sources and to study the use of microfilm as a mean of publication.3 In the fall of 1966, at the Munich meeting of the ICA Executive Committee, Ernst Posner, the U.S. representative, was successful in seeing that a Liberalization Committee and a Microfilming Committee were established. The work of these two com |
