August 26, 2009 – A new website launched this month is the result of several years of planning between the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the University of Cape Town – the Archival Platform is a networking, advocacy and research initiative.
According to the Archival Platform website, its aim is to “facilitate dialogue and information sharing between professionals, academics and government employees in the heritage and archive sector”.
The Archival Platform was started by Verne Harris, head of the Memory Programme of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, and Professor Carolyn Hamilton of the University of Cape Town, who identified a need for memory institutions to converse better across sectors. According to Harris, there was no obvious platform for the sharing of ideas in the archive sector, and they set out to remedy this by founding the Archival Platform.
The Platform is a joint project between the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the University of Cape Town (UCT). It is housed at UCT but the Foundation is a fulltime partner and on the Platform’s steering committee. The director of the Archival Platform is Dr Harriet Deacon.
The Platform’s mission is to “develop a few high-profile public interventions to increase public appreciation and use of the archive. It will also facilitate face-to-face and online networking activities between government, academics and professionals in the sector. This will open up new opportunities to strategise across the sector, identify key problems and successes, coordinate activities, and thus improve the management of the archive.”
By “archive” is meant not only records or books, but also “memory, cultural practice and places that tell the stories of the past”.
Harris says, “The Foundation is trying to occupy what we call the memory-dialogue nexus, and the Archival Platform is the perfect expression of that, as it is both memory work and dialogue work.”
For more information on the Archival Platform, visit their website.