STRATEGIC ALLIANCES 
AS SEEN BY ICOMOS AND INFORMATION USERS 
Robin Letellier 
(Letellier.R@Sympatico.ca) 
Vice-President (CIPA-ICOMOS) 
CIPA Heritage Documentation - International Scientific Committee of ICOMOS 
Invited Paper — Foramitti Special Session — July 23, 2004 
KEYWORDS: Cultural Heritage, Recording, Documentation, Information Management, Alliances, Strategies, 
Conservation 
ABSTRACT: 
CIPA organized a series of ‘outreach workshops’ between 1995 and 2000 to better understand how its activities 
could be adjusted to allow conservation specialists from all regions of the world to benefit from CIPA meetings and 
symposia. Following the recommendations from these outreach workshops, the Vice-President of CIPA, 
representing primarily the interests of ICOMOS, undertook a series of actions that had for objective: 
- to promote CIPA’s activities which consist largely in discussing, developing and sharing tools for the capturing 
and providing of information on cultural heritage objects, structures and sites; 
- to inform conservation specialists at large (i.e. information users such as archaeologists, conservation architects, 
object conservators, etc) that CIPA has much to offer in terms of methods and technologies to document historic 
resources; and, ; 
- to define mechanisms that would bring information providers (such as members of CIPA, ISPRS, etc.) to work 
jointly with the information users (such as members of ICOMOS, UNESCO, ICCROM, etc.) to raise heritage 
conservation practices to a higher level of standards. 
This paper provides an overview of the above activities and focuses on a ‘strategic alliance mechanism” that is 
currently being developed by conservation specialists from approximately 20 organizations, involved in various 
conservation practices. One of the criteria for creating sustainable alliances is ensuring that users and providers of 
information participate jointly at developing these strategies. 
This paper was completed in May 2004, after representatives from the above-mentioned 20 conservation 
organizations meet in Leuven (Belgium) in April 2004, to refine these strategies. It describes the alliance 
mechanism that will be initiated during the second half of 2004. 
BACKGROUND and coordinating a series of ‘Outreach Workshops’. 
This 5 year plan was introduced during a Special 
Session on CIPA activities at the 1996 ISPRS 
Congress in Vienna. During this Session, specialists 
from UNESCO, ICOMOS and CIPA introduced 
their respective organizations to the ISPRS. WGI 
presented the 5- Year Outreach Plan. 
1995 - CIPA's Krakow Meeting 
CIPA's WGI (Working Group 1!) was created in 
1995 as a result of the Krakow CIPA meeting and its 
discussions on the importance of ICOMOS' 
participation to CIPA's activities. As mentioned on 
the previous CIPA web site, one of WGI's 
objectives was to provide a forum for 
PHOTOGRAMMETRISTS and 
CONSERVATIONISTS to meet and discuss the 
integration of heritage recording activities to 
conservation practices. | 
To achieve this objective, WGI initiated CIPA's 5 
Year Outreach Plan, which consisted in organizing 
   
1996-1999 - Outreach Workshops 
Between 1996 and 1999, three Outreach Workshops 
took place namely in Austria (Gross Siegharts, 
1996), in Sweden (Marstrand, 1997) and in Brazil 
(Porto de Galihas, 1999). 
  
  
  
At the end of these Outreach Workshops, the 
strength of CIPA was identified to be its Symposia 
   
   
  
    
    
  
   
  
  
  
    
  
   
  
   
  
   
  
  
    
   
   
     
     
    
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