 If we want to talk about protection and access then we have to talk about archives because that is the future of the archaeological information that we spend our time recovering. So the future of archaeological archive practices should be an important part of any future discussions around the Belletic Convention or about anything else that we do. So I'm going to look at some initiatives that are current, some initiatives that have just happened, some of the pressures on archive practice in England as a case study if you like for how things are developing elsewhere and take a broader look beyond Europe at some of the initiatives that we're dealing with currently in the context of museum practice. So not just archaeological practice but how archives and archaeological archives fit into museums and museum ethics as well. So we'll start here. How many of you have seen the Archive Standard for best practice and archaeological archives? A few. Not enough. There's the web address. Go and track it down. It's available in several different languages as you can see from this site. And it's aim in the spirit of the Belletic Convention is to make archaeological data, information and knowledge available, stable, consistent and accessible for present and future generations. Our aim in producing this in as many languages as we possibly can is to make archive practice consistent and thereby make access to archaeological information relatively easy wherever you happen to be in Europe. So this is the first of a set of EAC guidelines and we're very proud to have been the first. It's available in several different languages as I've said and just to reiterate the point if any of you speak Icelandic that's just what I started off with our aim is to preserve, protect and make stable archaeological information. It's coverage is extending beyond Europe. We're very pleased of so since the 11th of May when it launched over 6,000 unique visitors to the website. So make sure you're in the next thousand worth. At the same time there is a crisis in museum practice across certainly across the UK and from my experience in Europe as well. This is Ikram, the website which broke the news. It's not really news to most of us that objects in museum storage are in peril mainly because for two reasons as we'll see lack of space was given as the most common reason for from two in three museums for finding it difficult to continue to collect. The problem for many museums is not just archaeological but archaeological archives are uncontrollable. They just grow and museums have very little input into the rate of the generation of archaeological material from projects. They just have to accept whatever it is largely is deposited with them. They don't have any say in whether an archaeological project should go ahead or not. Certainly not in the UK. In England, Historic England funded a project with the Society for Museum Archaeology to survey the state of collecting in England and to work out over three years. So this is the first survey in three sequential years to see how the picture changes. At the moment as you can see 35 museums are no longer collecting archaeological archives which means wherever archaeological excavations or projects are happening in those areas there is no museum to deposit the material. The material is therefore under threat because it just resides in stores run by the archaeological contractors. So the conclusion there 100x2027 112 museums out of 154 will be full and may have stopped collecting and that's an untenable situation. It's verging on a crisis for us and it's not unique. One proposed solution is to be more selective about what is retained in an archaeological archive to ensure that what is deposited with a museum is what should stay in a museum and be curated in the long term. The arch is standard has a section which sets out how to approach selection from an archive point of view to ensure that a selection strategy is part of project planning and to manage selection during the data gathering phase of a project. That's easier said than done. Meanwhile ICOM I don't know how much you know about ICOM but one of their mission statements is there and it's admirable that as I say museums are increasingly under resourced certainly in the UK and I'm sure elsewhere. ICOM have produced a code of ethics and a document called Key Concepts of Museology. How many of you are familiar with those? Worth a look especially for this if we start talking about selecting archaeological archives, protecting our heritage. These are the sorts of principles that we should be upholding when we're talking about transferring archives into museum care. The key concepts of museology is a fascinating document probably the best way of putting it. It basically has a sort of a dictionary of museological terms and the one that includes that covers collection is again a very important tool I think in our discussions around selection and the generation of archaeological material which will be curated in the long term and if we uphold the code of ethics and we adopt this terminology we will be in safer ground I think. We'll have a secure base from which to progress our discussions because we will be part of a wider community and these discussions have to take place in the broadest possible community because we all will be suffering the same problems. So the key concept of museology include and 15 minutes I don't have time to go into these in detail but I do recommend that you investigate them. Heritage is a public good museum institution is created and maintained by society that implies that there's a social responsibility to the curation of archaeological material that we should all uphold. They are also promoting standards and guidelines, CDOC, their conceptual reference model and the Council for Museum Documentation is currently engaged in a project under the title Archaeological Sites which has this aim to facilitate communication very similar to the Archae Standard. Am I doing for time? Good. To assist countries in an early stage in developing record systems so currently a working group for CDOC which is part of ICOM are using well referencing the international core data standard I don't know how many of you are familiar with that but that's even this key very very thorny document I'd say but good fun. This is attempting with key concepts of museology to establish a common language, common terms of reference for museum practice and methodology and terminology just as importantly and so we are working now on a basic standard for the disposition of archaeological archives having identified the problem that in many countries in the third world beyond Europe archive practice is even worse than it is in some parts of the UK and so the result as it says there is that objects lose their intellectual value with back to the concept of the key concept of museum and the museum collection and they propose a solution of an international standard so the CDOC group is now working on that standard referencing the Arches standard the EAC standard here and framing it within the cultural the conceptual reference model which is interesting and fun at the same time. The aim of course is to ensure that we produce something consistent and things like this tool here the archiving checklist chart is essential when you're preparing material to be transferred into museums. The CDOC working party has moved the debate further from the Arches guide as I say it does reference the conceptual reference model and sort of adopted terminology so we have to we're sort of slightly above the level of the Arches standard with these sorts of terminologies distinguishing different types of textual material in the documentary archive to make the whole thing consistent so the terminology is interesting and very much embedded in the CDOC mission I think and divides the material archive similarly into four different components which again ensures compatibility I think that's the aim across anyone who adopts the standard. It also is the definition perhaps a bit late but the definition of what an archaeological archive is from the Arches standard and the CDOC working group have refined that into these two elements the working project archive which is everything that is generated during the course of the project and then the preserved archive which is everything that we've identified to be preserved in the long term for curation beyond the duration of a project I think that's a useful distinction archive if archive practice is guided towards that aim of producing the preserved archive which can be everything that is in the working project archive there's no compulsion to select but it means that we are certain within the framework of CDOC and ICOM and everything else that what we deposit for future curation is exactly what needs to be preserved and again this is a communal activity which we should be sharing the responsibility for finally this is what should be in a preserved archive this is the idea of a perfect archive but I show this slide because this is a slide of the museum store in Barcelona the statue shown here was erected to celebrate Franco's victory after the civil war and is therefore very topical now therefore a point of great contention and had and obviously subsequently removed at the end of the Franco era it can never be displayed really it can never go back to where it was in in the town square and it certainly would focus a lot of negativity but by the same token it's not being destroyed it has been collected as evidence of a past that maybe people want to forget but it still has some meaning in terms of our understanding of our past and our shared heritage if we talk about archaeological archives we're a long way removed from this sort of contentious mode of collection so some perspective in this sense is not a bad thing thank you very much