On September 20-22 international conference - Archival Studies, Source Studies – Trends and Challenges was held at the National Archives of Georgia.

The goal of the conference: to collect scientific innovations, to bring together Georgian and foreign scientists to broaden communication, to promote interdisciplinary and intercultural researches, to seek for ways of adaptation to fit the modern needs of Cultural Heritage Management, to share the novelties of digital humanitarian sphere.

The aim of the project is to promote the Openness of State Archives in the former Soviet Republics. The first stage of the project includes 10 countries and up to 20 archives, evaluating them with the universal methodology created within the framework of the project and then advocating changes in those archives where openness on legislative level and in practice is not provided.

Project coordinator, Anton Vacharadze presented the joint theme with the project manager Levan Avalishvili at the conference - Archival Studies, Source Studies – Trends and Challenges, as well as on the previous stages of the project and presented the website prototype, which will be available to the wider public at the beginning of October 2018.

The General Director of the National Archives of Georgia, Teona Iashvili, attended the panel and was interested in the project, especially paid interest to points received by the archives of Georgia. After the presentation, Teona Iashvili and Anton Vacharadze discussed the points of methodology in which the National Archives of Georgia received unsatisfactory scores.

After the presentation, the discussion was held where the participants expressed their views and unanimously stated that the project was planned and implemented on time, and the state archives need more openness. The participants also deliberated on the archives of the former State Security Service (KGB) of Soviet Georgia in the archives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which was destroyed in the 1990s during the Civil War in Tbilisi. Many questions still remain open on the incident and this situation has caused a lot of speculations for the modern Georgian statehood.

After the presentation of the project website, detailed report will be available not only to Georgia’s but for the heads of state archives of nine countries. IDFI’s partners in these countries will recommend the archives to find out which components should be replaced by their work and we hope that they will take into consideration and correct these gaps.