Preliminary survey for CARBICA project

Networking – Shared memory

The scope of the project is to gather and exchange information on historical documents we know and/or we keep and which concern other countries of the Caribbean.

For example, Martinique will draw up the list of the records or groups of documents concerning Saint-Lucia, Saint-Vincent, Haiti…., and Saint-Lucia will do the same for the records concerning Martinique… and so on, and so forth.

In other respects, as we know that most of the records concerning the islands before the XXth century are kept in the former mother countries, we will try to complete or update the guides of the sources of the West Indies history, made by those former mother contries.

The result would be the following :

·         a common data base, open to all the member countries, that will inventory all those documents under a standardized format, compatible with ISAD (G) and with the other standards of international description, particularly EAD/XML

·         a digitization campaign of the most important records, either on the common history of the islands, or on the history of each of these islands. This gathering on CD ROM will be accessible to each member country and will be sold to people interested.

This project means an intense collaboration among the CARBICA countries on the first hand, and agreements between those CARBICA members and those of EURBICA on the other hand.

The project could be sponsored by ICA and supported by UNESCO. It could be part of Memory of the World program.

In practice, its implementation implies a steering committee and the definition of a 5 years lasting strategy :

-          work of the pilot countries in the first year : they will allow a life-size test

-          identification of the most important gaps of the history of each country supposed to be filled by additional information

-          creation of the exchange conditions for the least advanced countries as far as finding aids are concerned :

Ø     training sessions for sorting out of archives and for standardization of archival description

Ø     sorting out of identified priority records concerning neighbour countries (diplomatic reprensentations records, immigration services records, high political authorities records, records prior to the XIXth century (for at that period the changes of domination were frequent…)

Ø     necessary equipments for the exchange : computers, telephone lines, data processing software package

-          implementation fo the data base with the data of the first pilot countries

-          increasing of the base with the data of the other participant countries

-          identification of the main sources interesting groups of countries

-          digitization (a 3 to 5 years lasting program).

Download here the Preliminary survey for CARBICA project

Please send it to taffin@cg972.fr