September 2004 Edition

Patricia Sleeman
(2^nd from left, front row),
with attendees at the electronic records workshop

In November 2003, I stepped out of a plane into a warm tropical night in Havana, Cuba. Meeting me was Ra™l Rodriguez, a conservator from the Archives division of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment in Cuba. I was there with a colleague to give a four-day course on the management of electronic records. The Cuban government had decided that they needed to take action in relation to managing their electronic records as they felt that urgent work was needed in the area. 

As relationships have deteriorated with the European Union to the extent that Cuba receives no funding from the EU, they have had to look elsewhere for money. As a result the Social Science Research Council, a New York-based NGO, funded the trip, paying for our travel and accommodation expenses. Although the course was without a fee, seventeen parties applied to give it and we felt gratified to have got through the selection.

The approach we took was to follow the life-cycle of a record, i.e. all records have a beginning, middle and end. We described the challenges and solutions at each stage for managing records in electronic format. We emphasised that good electronic records management is impossible to achieve without good records management in place.

The class consisted of fifty-two students who had been selected from various parts of the Cuban Civil Service. They included archivists, information specialists, librarians, records managers, IT specialists and a nuclear scientist! We taught for six hours a day and the Cubans were a very receptive audience so often we had lengthy discussions regarding issues such as the definition of a "record" which can mean completely different things to different professions, as we have found out ourselves at NDAD. Expecting some Soviet-type operating system we were surprised to discover that Microsoft has the monopoly in Cuba, used at least by all of the students in our class. I am happy to report that there are no McDonalds in Havana and neither are there the ubiquitous Coca-Cola vending machines.

After the course I also visited the Ministry of Natural Resources to give them some advice regarding their archives. There I saw a wide range of holdings relating to the natural resources of Cuba, from nineteenth-century documents to a top of the range GIS system (ArchInfo). This particular ministry was very interested in the work of NDAD and I think began to appreciate that their electronic resources could be as valuable as their traditional archives.

Cuba itself is like a snapshot of a bygone era, but in other ways it is an example of what happens to a country that resists interference and foreign intervention, depending on your view of its political system. Rumour has it that McDonalds have already earmarked future sites in Havana for setting up shop once Fidel Castro and the present socialist system is gone. It was interesting to hear my colleague, who is Estonian, speak Russian with some of our students who had studied in the former Soviet Union, as well as reminisce about singing Guantanamera in national school and eating Cuban cane sugar during his childhood.

Patricia Sleeman
The National Digital Archive of Datasets, London