Jacqueline Cremers Secretary General, European Green Party

Lost archive…

When I entered the office in January our basement was filled with papers and boxes and loose files. They have to go I said to Ann and soon! We need this room for office space.To Ann's great reassurance I did not mean to throw them away, but archive the material, as should have been done long before. Johan Hamels suggested E-topia and I was really happy that I could hand over the archive to them. They carefully packed the material, made a list of what they took and have made plans to categorise it and make it available to the public. It will take a few years, but then we are up to date with that! For this relatively small institute it is special to have our European Greens archive, it is a true asset for their collection and it is centrally located close to the office in the heart of Europe. So far so good.

But there is more, Ann told, in England, a few boxes stacked somewhere in the buildings of the University of T-side in the UK. And she told me the story of the English delegate, Dick Richardson, who took, in 1996, some old material from the European Green Coordination (1984-1993) away to archive.  In 1999 or thereabouts we received the message that Dick had died.  The boxes with the material ended up in a shack we heard. Then the story ends, nobody knew why, how or what...

This year Johan offered to collect the material by car.  Our archive would be in one place. Since Johan wanted to know when he could go, I contacted some person at the T-side University. Oeps, the message that I would like to make an appointment to collect our boxes with EGP material, created some ice-cold wind and I knew something was wrong.

A visit to this months' UK Greens Conference seemed a good opportunity to have an appointment with the person who guarded these boxes during the last years. These boxes stacked in an old shack, appeared to be a full 25 meters material stored in one of the most sophisticated archives I have ever seen. Climatised room, special archived boxes and everything! Dick Richardson, former lecturer at the University, thought that our material should be saved from destruction and hoped to have the archive of the European Greens at his University.

I am most grateful to him and all the university staff, because the material in there is of our very first steps that we made to organise ourselves on a European level as European Greens. Furthermore there is lots of information on national green parties and some very interesting correspondence. Some of that very similar to that of today when it comes to applications and request to maintain voting rights despite not being able to pay membership fees (the answer is still the same: no!)

So there I am with one archive split in two locations with two institutions who are very keen and eager to archive the material and have it as a jewel in their archive crown. I will try to work out a solution to this problem and plan to have our archive in one place and electronically available with good cooperation between the two institutions.

And I think we may be for ever grateful to Dick Richardson for having the awareness that is is important to archive!