The Seminar on Business Archives in China by Didier Bondue

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The theme of this seminar was:
“Business records and archives: Challenges and Solutions in E-Era”
This seminar was “designed to provide an opportunity for Chinese corporate archivists / records managers to meet their counterparts from other parts of the world to exchange views and share good experiences and new initiatives, to examine the elements of a dynamic and successful business records and archive system, and to explore the strategies and measures to achieve them”.
After welcome by Mr Yang Shaosen, Deputy Secretary General of Guangdong Provincial Government, the introduction was done by Hans Eyvind Naess, ICA/SBL Chair and followed by a presentation about business archives development in China, by Mr Wang Lan, Deputy Director, Supervision Department of Economic, Scientific and Technical Archives from State Archives Administration of China.
The others presentations showed a lot of experiences among the western world but also from China:

• Hans Naess (ICA/SBL Chair Senior Adviser, National Archives of Norway) “Strategics for organizing business archives, the western hemisphere experience”.
• Bruce Smith, Senior consultant, Archive research consultancy Australia, Member of SBL bureau, “Promoting your business archives”.
• Helen Swinnerton, Manager HSBC Asia Pacific Archives, “Corporate archives keeping in the U.K, Standard and practices and new development”.
• Paul Lasewicz, Corporate archivist, IBM archives (USA), Emerges of New media and their implications to a corporate archives” (video).
• Didier Bondue (ICA/SBL Vice Chair, Director of Saint-Gobain Archives), “From records management to corporate culture, the archives of Saint-Gobain Group”.
• Yang Zhengang, Deputy Chief, Archives division of China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation, “Management of corporate archival information resources : construction of informatization in Sinopec Archives”
• Sgadleva Larisa & Bashveeva Olaga, Director and Deputy Director, Department on checking for observance archive legislation, the chief administration of archives of Moscow, “From experience of the work state archives Moscow with business organization”.

This survey gave rise a lot of questions concerning the best practices especially in the private companies, HSBC and Saint-Gobain.
The closing speech was done by Duang Dongsheng, Deputy Director General, State Archives Administration of China.