City Archive Cologne – request for assistance

Last week the Blue Shield received a request for assistance from the City Archive of Cologne. This archive is known as the most important City Archive north of the Alps and its destruction is a great loss to European Heritage.

The Blue Shield is the cultural equivalent of the Red Cross. It is the name of an international committee set up to work to protect the world’s cultural heritage by coordinating preparations to meet and respond to emergency situations. In December an international office has been set up in The Hague, which will coordinate international emergency response on behalf of the National Blue Shield committees (Association of the National Committees of the Blue Shield, ANCBS).

Call for support from the City Archive in Cologne

Request from the organisation of voluntarily professional support and temporarily storage rooms for the remaining archive material.

In the last few days the City Archive Cologne (Stadtarchiv Köln) and other related institutions received numerous offers for assistance. Therefore, the Cologne secretariat of culture (Kölner Kulturdezernat) had a task force meeting at the 8th of March 2009. At this meeting it was agreed on organising teams of professional volunteers in order to sort out following procedure for the remaining archive material. Furthermore, it was agreed on looking for temporarily storage possibilities for the still existing material.
In the field of archives the Rhenish – Westphalian Archive for Economics (Rheinisch -Westphälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv, RWWA) is in charge to arrange the support of professional support whereas the University of Applied Science Cologne (Fachhochschule Köln) is responsible to organise support in the field of restoration. The Regional Authority for Archive Consultancy and Training (LVR-Achivberatungs- und Fortbildungszentrum) does the identification of possible storage rooms for the archive material.

We ask our colleagues and other archives/institutions that can provide these resources to get in touch with. Please, take following information and required conditions into consideration:

Human resource support

a)  Archivist (higher service)
–  Minimal time period: 3 days
–  Working time is 7 days a week with three shifts of six hours that begin either at 8 am, 2 pm or 8 pm
–  Please, indicate your name, department, shift, and possible dates and your contact details
–  Room and board will be provided
–  Please, send an email to: rwwa@koeln.ihk.de

b) Restorer (experienced in the restoration of paper and photography’s)       
– Conditions and necessary information are the same as for archivists
– Please, send an email to: bert.jacek@fh-koeln.de

Duties and Responsibilities

Colleagues who would like to work with us will work on desks in a hall. This location serves as short-term storage where the retrieved material will be registered. Additionally, professionals are needed to make decision about the future steps of the material, e.g. restoration, packaging, etc.

Storage rooms

For the remaining material temporarily storage is needed until a new building will have been built. Therefore, we are looking for shelf capacities.
Please give us following details if you think you can provide the latter:
–  Name of the archive
–  Please, indicate the shelf surface in meter (length, width, and distances between shelf surfaces)
–  Please, indicate the location and technical equipment of the storage room (e.g. climate control, cooling system, etc.)
–  Please indicate the storage time period in month
–  Please, send an email to: afz.archivberatung@lvr.de


Contact:

http://www.ancbs.org