Who we are

The Military Archives Committee (CAM) is one of the operational bodies of the International Commission of Military History. Since 1990, when CAM was founded, the Committee tried to unite military archival institutions, experts and practitioners to encourage dialogue, exchange and transmission of knowledge and expertise in the specific field of military archives. As the International Council of Archives stated “effective records and archives management is an essential precondition for good governance, the rule of law, administrative transparency, the preservation of mankind's collective memory, and access to information by citizens”.  CAM agrees on this definition.

What we do

Because of the nature of semi-autonomous body within the ICMH, the activity led in the CAM are under the umbrella of the International Commission of Military History and under the Statutes of the Committee (see statutes). Basically, the CAM meets every year during the International Congress with a specific agenda. The meeting is open to one representative for each national commission in the ICMH. Furthermore other components of the commissions are welcomed. Moreover, since 2013, the committee managed to set up a panel on military archives, an archives visit (preferably on military archives) and other similar events, with the full support of national commissions responsible for the annual congress organisation. Behind all those initiatives is promoting co-operation with historians and the research community in order to spread the values of the archivists and to share with users the information available in the field of military archives.

One of the last projects launched since 2013 is to create a military archives guide online, after the first attempt to realise one on paper at the end of ‘80s. The idea is to have an online guide in order to facilitate institutions, researchers and users to find links to military archives and to access directly to the information needed. 

Every institution can download the template, fill the form and send back to link its website to our online guide. The committee encourages everybody (library, museum, local archives, family archives) who has military archives to participate to this project.

Since the foundation, the Committee tried to prepare and to distribute a newsletter (Mars&Janus) that faced success and failure at the same time. In 2021, the CAM decided to relaunch the initiative through the blog (https://cam.hypotheses.org/), a new operational tool useful for all the community. If you are interested to propose articles please contact the committee.

Who can join CAM?

CAM encourages membership from all National Commissions represented in the International Commission for Military History. Moreover, all the activities are open to any person or organisation interested in military archives. If interested in CAM activities, please check in which country the Annual Congress will be held and ask for the draft program. Then contact the CAM steering committee in order to receive support. 

For the membership, please see the Statutes.

Partnership

The Committee is happy to receive support in any field of interests with the aim to spread the knowledge and the skills in the specific field of military archives. Partnerships are fundamental to CAM's work because the Committee thinks that fulfilling its aims through collaboration represents one of the pillar of the knowledge dissemination through Society.

Volunteering

The Committee welcomes National Commission initiatives to support CAM. Volunteering is one of them. Volunteering is even open to university students, young specialists and users with a basic knowledge of the matter. Volunteers can disseminate knowledge both within the community of specialists and outside of it. They can contribute to raise the professional and scientific profile of CAM.

If you interested, please contact both the president and the secretary general of CAM.

The Archive's Committee board is composed by:

President:
Flavio Carbone (ITA), presidency.CAM@gmail.com

Secretary-General:
Kathleen Van Acker (BEL), secretarygeneral.cam@gmail.com

Previous Presidents:
Michael Steidel (GER), 2015-2020
Hans Pawlisch (USA), 2010-2015
Hans Joachim Harder (GER) 2005-2010
Rudolf Jaun (SWI), 2002-2005
Hans Christian Bjerg (DEN), 2000-2002
Manfred Kehrig (GER), 1992-2000
Erik Norberg (SWE), 1990-1992