This week, the Blinken OSA Archivum hosts the Archival Summer School for Ukraine, supported by the ICA-PCOM, the Galt Museum & Archives, and the Blinken OSA Archivum. At presentations, workshops, and discussion, emerging archivists from Ukraine will engage with and get insight from the Blinken OSA Archivum staff and an international team of fellow instructors.
Ukraine’s integration into the EU will require societal, legal, and institutional transformations, which includes the national archival system. Currently, Ukrainian archivists are not well integrated into the international archival community, and this isolation stands in the way of exchange of ideas, adoption of best practices, and collaboration across borders. This week, the Blinken OSA Archivum hosts the Archival Summer School for Ukraine (ASSU), a project supported by the ICA-PCOM, the Galt Museum & Archives, and the Blinken OSA Archivum.
ASSU is the first small step toward addressing the above issues, providing emerging professionals from Ukraine with the chance to explore foundational archival theory in English, interact with the experienced archivists, and apply knowledge to practice through engaged discussions and hands-on exercises. The project stives to become a stepping stone to future training opportunities, professional growth, and collaboration with European colleagues, as well as strengthen networks among Ukrainian archivists.
Participating Ukrainian archivists come from a variety of state archives across Ukraine, to attend presentations, workshops, and round-table discussions, and do research at the Blinken OSA Archivum. Archivists, audiovisual archivists, and reference archivists from the Blinken OSA Archivum will outline the Archivum’s immediate and broader institutional environment, present the results of our digitization strategy and our attempts at inclusive archiving, address a recent expansion in collection focus toward disempowered groups and their advocacy organizations, and offer a sneak peek at an upcoming Curated Collection of open-access documents on Ukraine’s path toward freedom in the 1980s–1990s. Besides the Archivum staff, fellow instructors include Søren Bitsch Christensen (Aarhus Stadsarkiv, Denmark), Irina Glik (Free Library of Philadelphia, USA), and the organizers of the program, Andrew Chernevych (Galt Museum & Archives) and Maryna Chernyavska (University of Alberta, Canada).