#IAW2024 / Using the Universal Declaration on Archives as an Advocacy Tool

Claude Roberto lives in Western Canada near Vancouver. Since 2017 she is Archivist Emerita at the Provincial Archives of Alberta, Canada, where she worked from 1985 to 2017 as Archivist, Team Leader and Business Manager. In 2024 she joined the Canadian Advisory Committee for Memory of the World, reporting to the Canadian Commission for UNESCO. Since 2020 she has chaired the Board of Directors of the Portail International Archivistique Francophone (PIAF) which is a collaborative information, communication and training website funded by the Association internationale des archives francophones.

She currently chairs the ICA Advocacy Expert Group (AEG) founded in 2014. She gave presentations and training workshops on advocacy at ICA conferences and congresses in Malta, Brisbane, Reykjavik, Girona, Seoul, Mexico City, Yaoundé, Adelaide and Abu Dhabi. She offers ongoing virtual presentations on archives and advocacy to the HEG university students in Geneva (School of Business Administration). In 2023 she offered virtual training workshops on advocacy to IMF in Washington DC, to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva and to the Kenya Association of Records Managers and Archivists. She also made a presentation in September 2023 during a virtual symposium supported by the ICA AEG and sponsored by ICA PCOM and the Canadian Advisory Committee for Memory of the World, on intangible cultural heritage, archives, and research.

Margaret Crockett is a British archivist and records manager based in London. After living and working in Germany, Washington DC and Hungary she returned to London in 1999 and established her own business working on recordkeeping projects in the UK and overseas. Her client list includes local government, charities, businesses and international organisations. She has also been delivering archives and records management training since 1992, spending a year working as a part-time lecturer on the Archives and Records Management Masters degree at University College London in 2000-2001. She is author of “No-nonsense Guide to Archives and Recordkeeping” and co-Director of the popular Basic Archive Skills Training Days.

Margaret joined ICA early in her career and in 1996 became Secretary of the Section for Archival Education and Training’s Steering Committee. She transitioned to a committee member in 2000 and was co-author of the Train the Trainer Pack. In 2009 she volunteered to support the CITRA Secretary and in 2010 she became ICA’s Deputy Secretary General CITRA. Margaret served as DSG until 2018, moving on to a broader role in ICA’s Professional Programme in 2012. Whilst supporting the Programme Commission, she played a key role in establishing the Africa Programme and the New Professionals Programme. From 2018 to 2023 Margaret acted as Training Programme Manager, establishing the online learning course of which Understanding and Using the UDA is one. She is currently working in a volunteer capacity on various ICA publications and serving on the Comma Editorial Board.

Carlos Zapata Cardenas lives in Bogota, Colombia. He has been a member of the ICA Advocacy Expert Group (AEG) for several years. Since 2015 he has held the positions of Advisor in the Department of Document Management, Advisor of Strategy in Information Management and Lead Advisor in the General Directorate of Information Management of the Banco de la República de Colombia. He is currently serving as Technical Director of the Library Network Department of Banco de la República.

Between 2011 and 2015, he served as Director General of the General Archives of the Nation of Colombia. He has been a university professor in the field of librarianship and archival science at the universities of La Salle, Javeriana and Quindío, as well as at the Universidad Nacional and the Universidad Militar Nueva Granada. He has participated as a lecturer in conferences and seminars held in Colombia, Ecuador, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Peru, Costa Rica, Mexico, Guatemala, Argentina, Chile, Spain, Uruguay and Brazil. He was a founding member of the Colombian Society of Archivists, and he has been its President for two terms. In addition, he has been Executive Secretary of the Latin American Association of Archives. Carlos translated several AEG documents into Spanish.