page_title: International Committee of the Red Cross archives
section_title: Collections and Holdings
hierarchical_section_title: International Committee of the Red Cross archives / Collections and Holdings
caption_attribution_description: English: Record shelves in the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) public archives at its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. - Photo taken and uploaded in the context of the International Archives Week 2020 of Wikimedia Switzerland, Austria and Germany and the Association of Swiss Archivists.
context_page_description: The archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross are based in Geneva and were founded in 1863 at the time of the ICRC's inception. It has the dual function to manage both current records and historical archives. The general historical archives are openly accessible to the general public up to 1975.
  Along with the ICRC Library, the archives are widely considered to be the greatest repository for records on International Humanitarian Law. They have been dubbed by some researchers as "the storehouses of sorrow", since they preserve the memory of many millions of victims of armed conflicts as
  "a legacy for mankind".
context_section_description: The public and audiovisual archives are divided into five sections: 
  The general public archives contain documents, mostly in French language, which cover the history of the ICRC since its foundation in 1863 until 1975;
  The Tracing Agency archives, which feature data about individuals, are technically open to the public until the 1950s. However, they are not open to general consultation as people have to go through the ICRC's tracing archivists. The only exception are all individual records relating to some two million prisoners of WWI- especially records of capture, of transfers between camps and of deaths in detention - which were made accessible online. The index cards primarily deal with the Western, Romanian and Serbian Fronts. Consultation of files on PoW and civilian internees during the Spanish Civil War or the Second World War requires specific skills. Hence, anyone can request information on an individual but the archives accept only a limited amount of requests per year because of limited resources. The tracing archives' files about people caught up in more recent conflicts are closed to the public, but the person visited in detention or their family can obtain information upon request.
  The photo library and archives contain more than 800,000 images from the ICRC's global activities since the 1860s. About 125,000 of them have been made available to the public in digital format.
  The film archives contain, as of early 2020, around 5,000 titles with some 1,000 hours of footage covering the ICRC's humanitarian work in conflicts around the world from 1921 to the present day, in a range of formats (video, 35 mm and 16 mm film).
  The audio archives hold more than 10,000 digitized sound files with thousand of hours of content, starting in the second half of the 1940s.
  The archives also hold private collections of documents that were deposited by former members of the Committee and delegates.
  As of early 2020, the ICRC archives held approximately:
  9 million digital documents,
  19 linear kilometers of shelf space for paper records,
  34 terrabytes of audiovisual electronic media, and
  41 million index cards about individual persons from the two World Wars.
  About 1.500 researchers on average consult the archives and library collections - both public and closed ones - every year.
  For 2019, the archives counted around 1.4 million page views on its websites. In the course of the same year, its staff handled about 11,000 requests, both external and internal ones.
caption: The public archives at the HQ
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