Actas do Seminario Internacional O futuro da memoria - Arquivos de ...

812
Anabella Barroso
Creating, preserving and disseminating our
digital memory. The case of AHEB-BEHA and
Centro Icaro.
Conservation and dissemination have been the
basic pillars of the archive policy of the Bilbao
diocese ever since the inception of the Bizkaia
Historical Ecclesiastic Archives (AHEB-BEHA) in
1976. Since early 2000 we launched a series of
digitation projects which, from the beginning,
were conceived as part of the Archive’s Digital
Service. With the creation and start-up of Centro
Icaro, a Centre for Advanced Historical Knowledge,
we have notched up a gear in the generation,
conservation and dissemination of our digital
heritage. This Centre attempts to show how
the main roles of archives, that is, collecting, preserving
and disseminating, are essential to build
our contemporary knowledge society by adjusting
to the consultative needs of citizens, bearing
witness of the unpredictable changes in history
and facilitating essential administrative tasks to
certify legal acts and ensure the rights and duties
of individuals.
We endeavour to turn into useful information,
but above all, readily accessible via physical or virtual
means for all sorts of users, the knowledge
accumulated for centuries in records kept by our
Archives, while we raise awareness on the importance
of contemporary records to preserve the
memory of our time for the generations to come.
Furthermore, by means of our Educational Programme,
we want to teach students of all levels
about the importance of collective and individual
memory to appraise the past, focus on the present
and guarantee the future of our heritage.
Centro Icaro aims at increasing the accessibility
of archival fonds kept at AHEB-BEHA – as holder
of the Archival Heritage from the 12th century to
the present date and part of the Bilbao Diocese.
This entails the adaptation of the virtual tools
and the main dissemination procedures of the
AHEB-BEHA in order to create a social network
whereby the Archives and its users can interact
and become creators of our memory.