International Archives Week 2021

This week has marked International Archives Week, an opportunity to raise awareness of the importance of the effective management of records and the preservation, care and use of the world's archival heritage.

This year’s theme of Empowering Archives has encouraged discussion around how archives empower accountability and transparency, how networking and collaboration empower archives and archivists, and how to challenge current archival theory and practice to make it more diverse and inclusive of different voices along with different histories.

To mark this year’s International Archives Week, why not watch some of our Be Inspired talks, which engage with different aspects of our Collections and explore some of the recent research that is bringing different histories and voices to the fore:

• Be Inspired: Unarticulated narratives of women on David Livingstone’s Expeditions – Join Dr Kate Simpson as she explores the Society’s digital library to identify the African women in the expeditions of David Livingstone, to present alternate narratives of exploration through which these women can be restored, and to reinscribe their role within the historical archival record.

• Be Inspired: Genealogy, geography and archives - This talk by Chandan Mahal recounts how people of Punjabi descent worked with the Society's archive to explore the places associated with their ancestral heritage using maps and photographs alongside their own family archives.

• Be Inspired: The Cape of Flowers: a forgotten corner of the Portuguese Empire - Beyond the Southeast Asian islands of spices lay islands of flowers and sandalwood. For a period between the 16th and 20th centuries this was part of the Portuguese empire. In this talk, Cliff Periera will give an account of cultural legacies of exploration of Luso-Asians.

Find out more about our Collections.

Watch more of our talks on demand.