Innovation & Human Rights is starting a blog to publicise interesting new initiatives and to share our work.
One of our projects is #GuerraCivil #opendata: this will be a central database of disappeared persons and victims of the Civil War, based, wherever possible, on specific documentary sources. In this we enjoy the cooperation and support of the Associació d’Arxivers i Gestors Documentals de Catalunya. We aim to base this on material drawn from the widest possible range of available sources documenting the deaths which occurred as a result of the Civil War and the Franco era.
Therefore we were present at the XVI Congrès d’Arxivística i Gestió de Documents de Catalunya held in Reus between May 4th and May 6th with a major article in the review “Lligall” in which this project is further explained. This article will be published soon on our website.
The availability of archives and open access to them are of fundamental importance: for democracy, for transparency, for open government and for high quality historical research. In the case of documentation related to the Civil War and the repression which followed, such access may also be regarded as a debt owed to the descendants of the victims and to society as a whole.