Graham Shaw, Ben Kiernan, Rich Richie and Laura Englestein

QUESTION: I wanted to raise the question of the graduate training element. That's on our list of questions, but, particularly for Ben, because in the Cambodian Genocide Project, it was built-in, not only to preserve the archive for research, for political or tribunal purposes, but to train. And Ben, like so many of our faculty, is clearly an educator who cares about the future of the profession and his students -- to train both budding legal and historian -- historic scholars. So, how did that affect them? Or how is what you do affecting the future? Or, I remember one of our graduates, who got a doctoral dissertation fellowship right around the collapse of the Soviet Union, and kind of wiggled into the Red Army Archives when it wasn't supposed to be open, but nobody quite knew what the rules were then, and she took peanut butter and soap, as I recall, and helped to get the Red Army archive -- some of it -- here.

So, if you could comment kind of on how some of these things affects the future of the students who get involved?

KIERNAN: The training actually went both ways. As part of the State Department grant to set up the Cambodian Genocide Program, we trained two Cambodians here at Yale, who got MA degrees, one in history and one in international relations. The first is back now in Phnom Penh in the history department and is one of the leading historians. He has not just English and Khmer, but Vietnamese, Lao, Thai, and some Japanese. And he spends time teaching in Japan, as well, so he's gone on to a career in Cambodian history.

The other is now the deputy director of the Cambodian Documentation Center, which we set up as our field office in Phnom Penh and funded it for the first seven years and it is now the independent Cambodian institute, which is the depository for all of the original documents. And we trained much of the staff of the documentation center in the actual preservation and cataloguing of the records, as well as microfilming of them. That gave us the training to train people afflicted by other genocides. And so we brought two Rwandans here in 2000 to set up databases on the Rwandan genocide, which we have followed up now, establishing a Rwandan Genocide Project and the databases are on the web, along with the much larger Cambodian ones. More recently, in East Timor, we trained about 30 East Timorese to preserve the records that survive there from the Indonesian occupation of 25 years.

RICHIE: I just wanted to add, too, that we still work very closely with the faculty member in the history department at the University of Phnom Penh. He was here last summer, working together with us on our Cambodian collection. I also worked with him personally because there are no established book dealers in Cambodia that work closely with libraries in the U.S. to collect materials of this kind. We work with our book collector, book dealer, who collects all sorts of things for Ben and I, as well as working with published works. He also worked together with Ann on a workshop last summer in Phnom Penh that Ann presented for how to develop proposals for collaboration.

QUESTION: First of all, I want to congratulate Graham on the Endangered Archive Program and, you know, it's obvious it's going to have a wonderful impact on access to important research imported from around the world. So this is not like it's any kind of criticism of the program. My question is just to understand some of the thinking that went into it a little bit more. On the one point you raised with regard to the long-term preservation, that is, if the program is not focusing on preservation and rather on access, is it the case that the program is not meant to unendanger the archives it addresses?

SHAW: Well, I mean, I said that some of you might disagree with the route we've chosen. It's very much guided by our sponsors. We have had to put the emphasis on access rather than preservation. I think I might, if I had -- if we had had free range in setting it up entirely, then we might have changed that balance. But I think our bursary program that really is for the moment seen as a very minor part of what we're doing, but hopefully, if we can help to train archivists and librarians -- and we've already had approaches, specifically, about, obviously, on conservation, both conservation and original materials, and also train in digitization.

We can help to develop those skills and let people there in the countries of origin take that longer term responsibility. I think, perhaps, the British Library was very conscious of not trying to take on other people's responsibilities and it could be an enormous task to try and be the world's surrogate national archive. I mean, however much money, however ambitious one wanted to be, it would really be impossible to do that. We have to face the facts, as I said, in the end, we have to try and encourage people in every country around the world to take their cultural heritage seriously and it can't be done from the U.S. or the U.K. or wherever it has to be. I mean, we've heard some excellent examples here this morning of how it should be happening and how it is happening, in a small way, gradually, gradually, that we build and build and those infrastructures will come.

It's a pity we don't provide money for restoring buildings, but, you know, ten million pounds is a lot of money over a number of years, but if you give out grants of fifty thousand, that's only twenty grants a year. To extend it to physical conservation, to extend it to costs of your parent buildings, I think it would just get swallowed up and have very little impact. As I say, it's a small contribution, very modest, but, hopefully, a useful one. Even I accept some of the reservations, but we have to face facts that we can only do so much.

QUESTION: The examples that we've heard about have been sort of academic and noncommercial and nonprofit kinds of engagement with archives in other parts of the world. One of the elephants in the room: Are the commercial microfilmers and commercial producers who are going around sort of locking up content, often on the basis of very attractive royalty arrangements with whoever it may be in third world countries and in other parts of the world. There are immediate and longer term advantages that can be perceived from the receiving country's institution's perspective, as well as this certainly does generate products that are preserved. How does this sort of presence play out within your own experiences in the areas with which you're familiar?

RICHIE: We had a panel discussion on that a few years ago at our Asian Studies conferences, where we actually brought in a lot of the large commercial microfilming companies. There was, indeed, a constant debate of these problems at the Southeast Asia library as to whether this is a good idea. After all, the commercial microfilming companies have the knowledge and the experience and some of the companies have a lot of experience with working in Eastern Europe. Why not transfer that knowledge to microfilming in Southeast Asia and getting permission to microfilm data?

The debate certainly continues to go on and I know Norman Ross did try and go and investigate microfilming large newspaper collections in Indonesia and archives and that sort of thing, with, unfortunately, very little success. A lot of us were more than eager to go ahead and let these people who know what they're doing supposedly go in and take care of microfilming projects rather than trying to learn how to set up projects ourselves. Unfortunately, Norman wasn't very successful. IVC and some of the other companies who are very good at microfilming the collections in the Netherlands and other places didn't seem particularly interested in going into Southeast Asia, but this is only a specific case. That doesn't really give you a firm answer. Actually, I don't know what the experience is for Latin America or for...

ENGLESTEIN: Well, it is an issue in Russia and I know there are -- I don't know the details, but there are -- some of this has been done and the libraries sell whole series of this or that. There's been some controversy at the other end, too, in terms of corruption and whatever. The not-so transparent way it works on the other end. So there are some issues -- and also issues about the patrimony end and the sense of, with regime change, that this is our national history. There is continuity here, even though it's used for political and ideological purposes. That's part of the reconstruction of political life and public life in Russia now. Commerce and the market are back, but they don't know how to regulate that. On the one hand, they need it and, on the other hand, it's suspect and, on the third hand, it's not always done even with the -- I shouldn't say this in this day and age -- the relative decorum that it operates in the West. So these are very controversial issues. But I really don't know the details.

RICHIE : There's also the issue that it also seems to be easier for us, as academic librarians, to go in and get permission to work closely with our counterparts outside of the United States, I think sometimes than it is for a commercial vendor, who is clearly out there for profit to get the same permission. So, sometimes, I think it is better for us, too. For instance, the National Archives of Cambodia set up their own microfilming efforts and they microfilm newspapers, their own archives, French colonial documents. And this is, literally, how they survive, how the whole archives survives, is by selling microfilm. I mean, literally, the incomes of the archivists and the director are so low that they have to go on the side and find other projects. We've tried to do cooperative things with them, but they say no, we really want to be in control of these sorts of projects because is how we survive.

QUESTION: I don't want to monopolize this whole thing, but this generates an idea which I'm thinking of right now, which is whether something like the Endangered Archives Program might include as an element in what it's doing, sort of business model training or sustainability training and look at this sort of larger prospective for all of these libraries and archival institutions.

SHAW: Yes, I think we've already started thinking about that. Of course, we've had some interest from some of the commercial microform publishers, what we were up to. I mean, I must say that the experience of them in the British Library. It's been a struggle to get them to be interested in Southern and Asian language material. I think they just don't see much of a market for it. More recently, some of them have seemed to be becoming interested in Arabic material, but it's a hard struggle to get them to be interested in anything that isn't in the English language, in our experience, even where we're offering it to them on a plate. But I take your point about it.