Cultural Heritage/Cultural Heritage at Risk
Definition
According to the Canadian Conservation Institute's Guide to Risk Management of Cultural Heritage, risk is "the chance of something happening that will have a negative impact on our objectives".[1]
Applied to cultural heritage it means that "many things can happen that will have a negative impact on heritage collections, buildings, monuments, sites, and on our GLAM institutions' objectives concerning their use and preservation."[1]
Background
All risks threaten tangible and intangible cultural heritage alike. Risk categories include sudden and catastrophic events, for example earthquakes, floods or armed conflict, as well as cumulative long-term processes, like gradual erosion of physical cultural artifacts due to exposure to biological or chemical agents, or the increasing loss of natural ceremonial sites due to rising sea levels.
These risks often interact with each other with humman-made crises further intensifying this effect. Climate change, in particular, acts as both a catalyst and an accelerator for evolving risk scenarios. [2][3]
Libraries, Archives, and Cultural Heritage at Risk
Libraries and archives are repositories of cultural heritage. Their core mission includes preserving tangible artefacts such as books or manuscripts and intangible heritage such as oral histories, ensuring that communities retain access to their collective memory and identity. Minimizing risks to their collections has always been an essential part of fulfilling that mission. But risk scenarios evolve, and libraries' and archives' evolve with them. Emerging threats like climate change and increasing social conflict have led them to adopt not only their approaches to managing risk, but also their professional roles. As a result, many libraries and archives are now incorporating disaster preparedness plans (DRMs), maintain regional emergency networks together with other memory institutions, serve as emergency hubs for their communities in the event of a crisis, and are aligning their services with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 11.4, which emphasizes the protection of cultural heritage.
Archives at Risk
Risk Management: Integral to the Mission of Memory Institutions
Risk management is of critical importance for memory institutions including GLAM institutions and the communities they serve. The cultural heritage they are entrusted with serves as a foundation for cultural identities, historical record, democratic participation, knowledge building and societal progress. These institutions act as custodians of collective memory by preserving tangible artefacts, documents and immaterial traditions. Their mandate is to serve as secure repositories for cultural heritage, making risk management an intrinsic part of their mission, rather than a reactive measure. This is reflected in proactive strategies and practices to mitigate risk for potential harm to the collections they preserve.
Resources
Projects on Archives at Risk
American Archives and Climate Change: Risks and Adaptation
From the project description:
This project is the first to our knowledge to investigate the spatial variability of climate risks to libraries and archives and detail how this may change in the future under expected climate change.
Publications on Archives at Risk
- Moss/Thomas (2021). Archival silences: Missing, Lost and, Uncreated Archives[4]
- Abstract
- Archival Silences demonstrates emphatically that archival absences exist all over the globe (contributions from [...] Australia, Brazil, Denmark, England, India, Iceland, Jamaica, Malawi, The Philippines, Scotland, Turkey and the United States. The book questions whether benign ‘silence’ is an appropriate label for the variety of destructions, concealment and absences that can be identified within archival collections. Making a clear link between autocratic regimes and the failure to record often horrendous crimes against humanity, the volume demonstrates that the failure of governments to create records, or to allow access to records, appears to be universal. Arguing that this helps to establish a hegemonic narrative that excludes the ‘other’, this book showcases the actions historians and archivists have taken to ensure that gaps in archives are filled. Yet the book also claims that silences in archives are inevitable and argues not only that recordkeeping should be mandated by international courts and bodies, but that we need to develop other ways of reading archives broadly conceived to compensate for absences.
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Pedersoli Jr., J. L., Antomarchi, C., & Michalski, S. (2016). A Guide to Risk Management of Cultural Heritage. ICCROM; Canadian Conservation Institute. https://www.iccrom.org/publication/guide-risk-management
- ↑ De Lucia, C., Amaddii, M., & Arrighi, C. (2024). Tangible and intangible ex post assessment of flood-induced damage to cultural heritage. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 24(12), 4317–4339. https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-24-4317-2024
- ↑ Sasaki, S. (Ed.). (2024). Building resilience: Disaster risk management for documentary heritage and digital archives; training toolkit. UNESCO. https://doi.org/10.58338/NNWI1226
- ↑ Moss, M., & Thomas, D. (Eds.). (2021). Archival silences: Missing, Lost and, Uncreated Archives (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003003618
Author: Christian Schmidt (talk)