Disaster Management Planning in Libraries, Museums, and Archives
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The Disaster Management Planning in Libraries, Museums, and Archives Conference was held at the BA on 23 and 24 October. The conference was organized by the BA under the theme “Our Heritage at Risk: Challenges and Responses” and mainly focused on disaster management and cultural heritage in the Arab World.
Various specialists and experts from around the world participated in the conference as speakers, including librarians and museum curators who have witnessed the loss of cultural heritage through natural disasters or wars, in addition to a group of disaster management experts in libraries, archives and museums from international organizations, such as IFLA, UNESCO, and other organizations specializing in the same field.
The conference aimed to establish a vision or plan for disaster management at cultural centers in order to protect cultural and civilizational heritage. Accordingly, the conference hosted experts from IFLA , UNESCO, and the International Committee of the Blue Shield (ICBS) who work in the field of preserving heritage.
The conference speakers emphasized that the Arab World and Africa are facing several challenges in the field of preserving cultural and civilizational heritage, including lack of funding and the scarcity of heritage conservation resources. Thus, the importance of conference arises from identifying different experience and experiments and devising preventative plans to preserve heritage.
During the conference, the details of the Memory of the World Project were presented. The project is an international UNESCO initiative that is based on cooperating and building partnerships with governments, private sectors, and researchers in all fields to document human heritage through preserving historical documents and providing interested organizations and institutes with access to digitally documented records and heritage. The program works with several countries from Africa, the Arab Region, and Asia, and it has 64 local committees in different countries.