On July 16, the Chair of the National Executive Committee of the Lithuanian American Community, Edita Buzėnienė, met with the Chief Archivist of Lithuania, Inga Zakšauskienė. During the meeting, the main issue of digitizing archives was discussed, i.e., where specific archives are stored, what is the access to them and how information about the archives is disseminated.
A unified system for all Lithuanian archives in the US was also discussed, which could be implemented through training. During the training, organized by the Chief Archivist Office of Lithuania, the rules that all archives should follow would be presented.
The possibility of Lithuania helping to determine the value of documents or even helping to digitize them was also considered. The digitization of the archives of the DP generation and the determination which documents are the oldest and most fragile, especially important in the context of Lithuanian-American relations, were emphasized.
During the meeting, a virtual meeting with representatives of all Lithuanian archives in the USA, and later training and the possibility of creating databases that would store all digitized material were talked about. Although maintaining databases is expensive, it was proposed to join the digitization program EAIS being developed in Lithuania with no free, which can store a large amount of material, both internal (closed) and external, accessible to everyone.
The Chief Archivist of Lithuania introduced the Diaspora.lt website, where one can search information about archives by country of the world. The topical question how to agree on the storage location of original documents was also touched upon. It was decided that this issue should be discussed at a round table sometime in the near future.