The 51st IALHI Annual Conference 2021 was planned for Zurich with our Swiss colleagues at the Sozialarchiv, but the outbreak of Covid-19 put a stop to that. We were forced to switch to a number of Zoom meetings.
Nearly forty brave souls still showed up online to attend the General Assembly and the sessions and workshops on Thursday, September 10th, and Friday, September 11th. That's considerably fewer than the 80 to 100 participants we usually see. On the other hand, this time there were also participants from Argentina, Nepal, Japan, and Australia. Perhaps a combination of virtual and in-person formats is appropriate for this international conference from now on.
Amsab-ISG presented a short session outlining the impact of the coronavirus crisis on the institute's operations and collection acquisitions. In addition, workshops were led by Donald Weber on the Social History Portal and by Sofie Veramme (project 'World of Diamond') on our experiences with Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR).
The next editions of the IALHI conference – hopefully post-corona – are planned for Zurich in 2021 and Buenos Aires in 2022.
