Towards a global policy framework for sustainable preservation of documentary heritage through disaster risk reduction and management

This is the report of the 1st Global Policy Forum on "Disaster Risk Reduction and Management for Sustainable Preservation of Documentary Heritage". The forum aimed to draw attention to disaster risk reduction as a strategic framework for conceptualizing and elaborating policies and strategies to combat disasters. The Global Policy Forum was supported by Japan as part of a three-year Funds in Trust project on “Preservation of Documentary Heritage Through Policy Development and Capacity-Building”. This is the first of what will become a yearly event, focusing on a strategically important aspect of documentary heritage.

Among the issues on which several experts presented papers were:

• An overview of disasters and the impact they have had on documentary heritage, including how stakeholders, such as experts, communities, governments, etc., responded to such disasters.  Here, speakers included Daisuke Sato who shared his experience during the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami in 2011 and Abdel Kader Haidara who was awarded the 2018 UNESCO/Jikji Memory of the World Prize for his effort in the preservation and restoration of Timbuktu manuscripts in Mali.
• An analysis of the technical aspects of preserving documentary heritage damaged as a result of natural or man-made disasters, with speakers such as Eugenio Veca who shared safeguarding measures for Italian archives and libraries in emergency situations and  Andy Corrigan who shared his insights into the emergency management system and disaster recovery plan adopted for his library after Hurricane Katrina in the United States.
• Documenting disaster as action research for awareness raising and community engagement, where speakers included Hidenori Watanave and Anju Niwata who shared digital technologies integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) innovation for archiving memories of disasters in Japan as well as Lothar Jordan who highlighted the need to archive memory on disasters, including how to archive such memory for effective use in society.