IAU Commission 41

The Archives Working Group

At the 1991 General Assembly in Buenos Aires the following C14 Resolution was adopted:

"that the Union supports the initiatives taken by them [Commissions 41 and 5]
1. to establish a register of the whereabouts of all extant astronomical archives of historical interest;
2. to impress on observatories and other institutions their responsibility for the preservation, conservation, and where possible, cataloguing of such archives;
3. to search for an institution that will allocate space and funds for maintaining such a register and publishing it."
(Proceedings of the Twenty-First General Assembly, p.77).

Commission 41 then formed an Archives WG to further the objectives of this Resolution, and in the course of the next three years some progress was made in compiling national inventories of astronomical archives.

Two archival Resolutions proposed by C41 were adopted at the 1994 General Assembly in The Hague, and a number of members presented papers on their archival researches, and there were also discussions regarding the IAU archives.

A further archival Resolution was adopted at the C41 Business Meeting at the 1997 General Assembly in Kyoto, and at the 2000 General Assembly in Manchester a half-day Special Session on "Inventory and Preservation of Astronomical Archives, Records and Artifacts" was held. A WG Meeting was held at the 2003 General Assembly in Sydney.

The Committee members of the Archives Working Group are: Brenda Corbin (USA - Chair, e-mail: corbin.brenda@usno.navy.mil) Ileana Chinnici (Italy), Suzanne Débarbat (France), Wolfgang R. Dick (Germany), Daniel Green (USA), Wayne Orchiston (Australia), and Adam Perkins (UK).