The 40th World Congress of Institut International de Sociologie
The Official Website is here.
Regular Session: Archives for Maintaining Community and Society in the Digital Age
Sunday, 19 February, 2012
Convener: Keiji FUJIYOSHI, Associate Professor, Koyasan University, Wakayama, Japan
Call for papers (Abstract):
The main purpose of this session is to discuss the roles of archives in a society.
We discussed the roles of archives in democratic societies and how they function in a particular country at the regular session, ‘Archives, Accountability, and Democracy in the Digital Age’ that we convened in the 38th World Congress of IIS held in Budapest, Hungary in 2008. Our aim then was mainly to discuss how archives function to keep democracy in a society in terms of accountability of the government, which concerns principally the governmental in-house archives. We are going to widen the range of discussion of archives in a society at the regular session in the next IIS World Congress in Delhi in 2012.
Roles of archives may depend on a society and its culture in which they are situated and function. To respect archives as an accumulation of records and documents that have been produced and preserved in organizational businesses, public or private, could be said to respect the past. People’s attitude toward archives as a holder of the past, therefore, could depends on how and to what extent they respect their past.
As widely known, there are many archives, real or virtual, that hold a kind of relics that symbolize or memorialize a particular social or historical event, as well as records and documents. They appear to tell us some story as a history to be remembered. In this viewpoint, it could be said that to have archives is to provide a story to be shared among the society.
What kind of story do archives try to share with the people in society? This is what we would like to discuss in the session.
Presentations are welcomed that are to provide some information about the present conditions of archives in a particular society.
