Culture, the MAB congress in Naples: 'What future for museums, archives and libraries'

The 3th National MAB Congress will be held in Naples on March 4 and 29, at the Library of the Society of Naturalists and the San Lorenzo Maggiore "fra Landolfo Caracciolo" Library. More than three years after the previous national congress, held on November 2019, 2011, at the Central State Archives, this event aims to reaffirm the alliance between museum, archive, and library professionals established in XNUMX with the ICOM-ANAI-AIB Protocol, which was subsequently joined by the Italian Confederation of Archaeologists (CIA) and the Italian Association of Conservators and Restorers of Archives and Libraries (AICRAB).

The conference is divided into three sessions, highlighting MAB's experiential and socio-cultural components, the technical-scientific exchange between disciplines, and the political and civic vocation of cultural associations.

The morning session on Friday, March 3, entitled "Collaboration among MAB professionals: the voice of the territories (2020-2023)," will open with a roundtable discussion that will offer an opportunity to learn about the diverse array of MAB experiences developed by the regional sections from 2019 to today, which are the fruit of the collaboration of professionals active in the reality of local museums, archives, and libraries.

Representatives from the regional branches of the associations will also meet to discuss the future of the MAB network in terms of its organization, content, and future cultural objectives, with the aim of consolidating and further enhancing collaboration among cultural heritage professionals working in cultural institutions and venues.

The afternoon session ("Describing and Managing Photography in Archives, Libraries, and Museums: A Necessary Realignment of Theory and Practice from a MAB Perspective"), of a scientific nature, will address the highly topical theme of describing photographs and photographic archives, which in themselves constitute a forum for comparison between descriptive approaches from different disciplinary fields.

Although specific cataloguing standards exist, photographic documentation continues to be described differently today, often depending on the nature of the institution that preserves it. Representatives of not only associations, but also universities and the central institutes of the Ministry of Culture responsible for cataloguing cultural heritage will be invited to discuss current descriptive issues, encouraging the resumption of the theoretical debate surrounding the description of photographic documentation.

Post-Covid cultural policies will be the focus of the morning session on Saturday, March 4, entitled "Communities at the Center." It will be an opportunity to reflect together on how museums, archives, and libraries can contribute to making the principles of bottom-up participation expressed in the Faro Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage concrete and relevant in the daily practice of cultural institutions. The Convention was ratified by Italy only on September 23, 2020, a full fifteen years after its original draft. The second part of the session will present a MAB policy document, which will propose general lines of action to guide future cultural policies in the interest of protecting and enhancing cultural heritage and the professionals involved in these activities. The conference will conclude with presentations by the Presidents of the Associations that make up the MAB network.