Access to information is widely perceived as an uncontested good, a right of the same order as access to clean water and electricity. UNESCO says that universal access will empower people if “they can access and contribute to information and knowledge flows,” and that a digital infrastructure will provide it. Governments all over the world mouth support for these aspirations and the public has come to expect access to all sorts of information wherever and whenever they want and need it, including, and perhaps especially, sound and audiovisual content.

With all the resources and effort expended on digitisation we would expect that by now access to our audiovisual collections should have become universally easier, and the online facilities that could provide unlimited and unmediated access to this content should — given its unprecedented use. Yet, all too often we can only access catalogues with no access to the actual sound, lists with no video, information about information, but not the information itself.

The laws and policies that control use, the technologies that deliver it, and the costs and distribution of resources present barriers to our aspirations. Are we being realistic? Are these constraints now permanently built into the system, or are we just in transition on the way to achieve universal access to the knowledge dissemination systems?

What can be done to ensure that our collections are becoming accessible? How do we deal with copyright? Are strategies in place to ensure accessibility to our collections? Do the technical systems and infrastructure truly support it?

This conference aims to investigate and discuss the issues pertaining to access alongside the following subthemes:

Copyright and IP:

• Copyright and access: does protection of the individual’s rights outweigh the universal right to access?
• How do we circumvent copyright appropriately and provide access for all?
• Access, copyright and reasonable risk
• Orphan works and wider access

Technologies

• Tools that provide access and systems that restrict
• Technical infrastructure and information access
• Portable devices, and sound and audiovisual collections

Users:

• Defining the user
• Increasing use, attracting new users
• From the user perspective: how are people using access? (how access changed the way…?)
• Examining how increased access can affect collection decisions such as acquisition, preservation, and documentation.

Access:

• Access and authenticity
• Successes and failures of providing access in the digital domain
• The impact of access on our archives
• Indigenous use and appropriate access
• Ethics and access
• What does access mean?
• Online vs traditional access – access multiplied or context lost?
• Leveraging access with increased usage of archives
• Sustainable access
• Innovation and access
• What strategies are research organisations and broadcasters planning for access?
• Collaborations and partnerships to make access possible
• Open access: between freedom and control.

Online Access

• Semantic web and access
• Free access or mediated access? Gatekeeper or facilitator? The role of reference staff.
• Access tools/set of tools – access on- and offline

Funding

• The affordability of free access/access for all
• How realistic is access for all from a funding perspective?

The IASA Executive Board invites proposals for presentations, posters and panel discussions for the 43rd IASA Annual Conference, to be held in New Delhi, India, 6-11 October 2012. The closing date for submissions is January 31, 2012. All proposals must be accompanied by an abstract (maximum 250 words).

If you require any further information or have questions please contact the Organising Committee and the conference administrator through enquiries@iasa-conference.com The Conference Convener is Shubha Chaudhuri, and Ilse Assmann and Kevin Bradley are members of the organising committee. Bruce Gordon is the IASA Vice President responsible for conferences. All conference committee members can be contacted on enquiries@iasa-conference.com

The local organising committee is:

• Leela Samson, Chairperson, Sangeet Natak Akademi
• Kamalini Dutt, ex Director, Doordarshan Archives, New Delhi
• Amlan Das Gupta, Director School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University, Calcutta
• G. Sundar, Director, Roja Muthiah Research Library, Chennai
• Suresh Chandvankar, Secretary, Society of Indian Record Collectors, Mumbai
• Moe Chiba, UNESCO, New Delhi
• Shubha Chaudhuri, Director, AIIS Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (Conference Convenor)

Please find all conference information as well as the submission form on the conference website at http://2012.iasa-web.org. It is preferred that presentation proposals are submitted online. However, if you do not have internet access and you would like to submit a presentation or register for the conference, please contact Ilse Assmann by fax at +27 11 714-4419.

The Director of the China Film Archive would like to kindly request SEAPAVAA members to answer this survey within the next two weeks. Thank you very much.

Please download AICCC survey document here.

Lifetime SEAPAVAA member Jim Lindner has been featured at Time Magazine where he talks about the future of AV archiving and preserving our global video heritage.

In Transition: Access for All
New Delhi, India, 6 – 11 October 2012

On behalf of the AIIS Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology, we invite you to New Delhi for the 43rd IASA Annual Conference.

It is a great honour for us and our hosting partners to have you in India for IASA 2012. We are certain that this will be a very stimulating and interesting conference, with the opportunity of meeting old friends as we do at all IASA conferences, but in a location that is quite different, getting to know India through new friends that we hope you will make, and interacting with new challenges.

This will be a very important event for those of us who work in the field of audio visual archiving in India, and we will do our best to make this not only professionally exciting but to have a great time!

We believe that the theme of our 2012 Conference is relevant to all of us, the wider IASA membership and our situation in India. We are at a crossroads (and have been for a while!). It is a period of transition with which we in India as in many other countries are struggling with.

New technologies, changing standards, challenges of digitization, finding financial support for preservation etc. The aim is of course ‘Access for all’ and that is the biggest challenge.

As we work towards the conference in the weeks and months ahead we will be finalizing the themes for the conference.

Please find all conference information on the conference website at http://2012.iasa-web.org

For any further information or questions please contact the Organising Committee and the conference administrator through enquiries@iasa-conference.com

UNESCO is inviting new nomination proposals for inscription on its Memory of the World International Register, a list of library collections and archive holdings of world significance, which was established in 1997 to promote documentary heritage of universal value. Nominations should ideally be submitted through the National Commissions for UNESCO or the Memory of the World National Committees in the countries where they are located. Proposals should be based on the selection criteria listed in the General Guidelines to Safeguard Documentary Heritage, which stipulates that the most important criterion for inscription on the Register is the universal significance of the documentary heritage.

The deadline for the submission of nominations is 31 March 2012 and no late submissions will be accepted. They should be submitted to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Secretariat:

• by email to: j.springer(at)unesco.org;
• by mail, accompanied by an electronic version on CD-ROM or USB key, addressed to: Joie Springer, Memory of the World Programme, Knowledge Society Division, 1, rue Miollis, 75732 Paris Cedex 15, France.

For more information, kindly visit the website at: MOW registration site

Gaining recognition for the preservation of audiovisual materials have been a daunting task, one that took years and concentrated effort from dedicated archivists to rally for. Now, six years later, their work has been rewarded as UNESCO continues to support and encourage everyone to celebrate the World Day for AV Heritage every October 27 in commemoration of the importance audiovisual documents have on one’s nation, one’s culture, and his identity. With the year 2011’s theme of “See, Hear, Learn,” the World AV Day reaches more and more individuals as it shows how these fragile and oft overlooked documents can appeal directly to the senses, regardless of borderlines, disputes, and language barriers.

The Southeast Asia-Pacific Audiovisual Archive Association (SEAPAVAA), as an active member of the Coordinating Council of Audio-Visual Archives Associations (CCAAA), the designated body for this celebration, continues to commit to the mission and vision of this special event. By gathering archives, private or public, national and international, we hope to further strengthen the response and reaction towards preservation work, to foster a conscious effort to save collective memory, and to create more linkages and collaborative work among AV archives for them to understand and learn from each other.

It is in this spirit that I say that the AV archivist’s work is far from over, for everyday new content is being made, and everyday more and more of the world’s audiovisual heritage is lost due to neglect, decay, and the lack of resources, skill, and manpower necessary for the job. Thus, I urge all those who come across a film, any sound recording, a pneumatic tape, or even a video camera to think twice about what it is they are holding in their hands: within their grasp is a potential source of history, culture, and memory, and could very much be a fountain of knowledge from which future generations could draw from. You are the content-maker, the shaper of things to come, and you are capable of safeguarding these captured moments by taking an active role in the preservation and celebration of your audiovisual heritage.

Happy World AV Heritage Day 2011 everyone! As the defender of AV materials and champion for world heritage, may every archivist today feel appreciated just like a proper hero.

Tuenjai Sinthuvnik
SEAPAVAA President

EUscreen: Television heritage online

EUscreen is a unique showcase of Europe’s television heritage. The portal www.euscreen.eu is officially launched on Thursday, Oct. 27th, in celebration of UNESCO’s World Day of Audiovisual Heritage.

Major audiovisual archives in Europe have joined forces to offer unified access to the history of television in Europe. Thousands of video’s and images are available for free online consultation, and additional content is added on a daily basis. The EUscreen portal has been accessible in beta testing mode since early 2011, but received an entirely new layout. The new layout has been extensively tested and accounts for the needs of the various user groups EUscreen focuses on in the fields of education, research, and for the general public.

The portal provides a wide variety of functionalities to search and browse the collection, which can be used in different contexts such as curricula and research programmes, for remix, and for leisurely dives into popular history. Additional tools for curated exhibitions and an academic e-journal which researches significant trends in over 60 years of European television with the help of original programme sources will become available in 2012.

“With EUscreen we encourage users to actively engage with the history of Europe and the history of television regardless of the language and cultural boundaries. This is a great step forward to explore the role of television heritage in how we came to see ourselves and others in changing times”, says project co-ordinator Sonja de Leeuw.

About EUscreen
EUscreen is a three-year project and started in October 2009. With the support of FIAT/IFTA, the European Broadcasting Union and the Europeana Foundation, the EUscreen Best Practice Network aims at achieving a highly interoperable digitised collection of television material. The project brings together 28 partners from 19 countries. The project is supported by the European Commission as part of the e-Contentplus Programme. Content will also become available through Europeana, the gateway to Europe’s vast heritage collections that currently provides access to over 20 million objects from libraries, museums, archives and audiovisual archives.

For more information about the project and the scope of the portal, see http://blog.euscreen.eu

About the World Day of Audiovisual Heritage

The UNESCO World Day of Audiovisual Heritage is celebrated annually since 2007. On this year’s 5th Annual World Day, the theme is “Audiovisual Heritage: See, Hear and Learn”. The theme corresponds with the aim of EUscreen to be a multimedia resource for the general public, pupils and scholars alike.

---

Erwin Verbruggen
Research & Development
T +31 35 – 677 16 91 M +31 6 – 15 360 371

Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
Media Park, Sumatralaan 45, Hilversum
Postbus 1060, 1200 BB, Hilversum
www.beeldengeluid.nl

The Endangered Archives Programme at the British Library is now accepting grant applications for the next round of funding. Detailed information on the timetable, criteria, eligibility and procedures for applying for a grant is available on the Programme’s website. Applications will be accepted in English or in French. The deadline for receipt of preliminary grant applications is 4 November 2011.

Since it was established seven years ago, the Programme has so far funded 162 projects worldwide with grants totalling £4.2 million. The Programme is funded by Arcadia, in pursuit of one of its charitable aims to preserve and disseminate cultural knowledge and to promote education and research. The aim of the Programme is to contribute to the preservation of archival material worldwide that is in danger of destruction, neglect or physical deterioration. The endangered archival material will normally be located in countries where resources and opportunities to preserve such material are lacking or limited.

The Programme’s objectives are achieved principally by awarding grants to applicants to locate relevant endangered archival collections, where possible to arrange their transfer to a suitable local archival home, and to deposit copies with local institutions and the British Library. Pilot projects are particularly welcomed, to investigate the survival of archival collections on a particular subject, in a discrete region, or in a specific format, and the feasibility of their recovery.

To be considered for funding under the Programme, the archival material should relate to a’pre-modern’ period of a society’s history. There is no prescriptive definition of this, but it may typically mean, for instance, any period before industrialisation. The relevant time period will therefore vary according to the society.

For the purposes of the Programme, the term’archival material’ is interpreted widely to include rare printed books, newspapers and periodicals, audio and audio-visual materials, photographs and manuscripts.

The Programme is keen to enhance local capabilities to manage and preserve archival collections in the future and it is essential that all projects include local archival partners in the country where the project is based. Professional training for local staff is one of the criteria for grant application assessment, whether it is in the area of archival collection management or technical training in digitisation.

The Programme is administered by the British Library and applications are considered in an annual competition by an international panel of historians and archivists.

For further details of application procedures and documentation as well as EAP projects and collections, please visit the Programme’s website: http://eap.bl.uk/
Email: endangeredarchives@bl.uk

Memorimage Reus Internactional Film Festival (9-12 November 2011) is a competitive film festival targeting films that use archival footage. Memorimage is the appreciation of the past in the cinema filed.

Memorimage means city, entertainment, creation, participation… for everyone, children and adults, citizens, film lovers and professionals.An innovative initiative that promotes the discovery, restoration and preservation of the audiovisual heritage.

For this year’s celebration, Memorimage presents a programme that places priority on quality and seeks out the most recent film productions and also a number of additional activities for all kind of audiences, making Memorimage a strategic point of encounter to learn about and debate on the use of archival footage.

OPENING CEREMONY

The opening ceremony of Memorimage Festival will take place on Wednesday the 9th of November at 8.00pm in the Bartrina Theatre of Reus.

During the ceremony, the festival will be presented by its director Anna Marquès, with the presence of the jury members, the programmers and the filmmakers of the screening films.

There will be a screening of the film Brava, Victoria!, directed by Maria Gorgues. She will present the film and will also answer questions from the audience after the screening.

Assistance to the opening ceremony is free of charge, but it is necessary to confirm attendance, which can be done by sending an email to npoch@reus.cat, or by calling 977 010 228 from 11am to 2pm.

Places are limited.

CLOSING CEREMONY

The award ceremony will take place during the Closing Night on Saturday the 12th of November at 20pm in the Bartrina Theatre of Reus. Assistance to the closing ceremony is free of charge, but it is necessary to confirm attendance, which can be done by sending an email to npoch@reus.cat, or by calling 977 010 228 from 11am to 2pm. Places are limited.

The programme for the festival can be found at: http://www.memorimagefestival.org/en/programacio.php?id=108&edicion=2011&sub=1

There will also be a professional seminar on PUBLIC DOMAIN: ROYALTY FREE FOOTAGE WITH THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE USA AS MAIN SPEAKER Saturday 12th of November from 9.30 am a 6 pm at Centre de la Imatge Mas Iglesias de Reus (CIMIR) – Spain.

Carol Swain, archivist of the United States National Archives (NARA) Ramon Casas, member of the Intellectual Property of the Culture Department

A unique oportunity to discover one of the most important audio-visual holdings in the world and to know the reality of the public domain in the US and in Spain

Content of the Seminar:

• Presentation: NARA: what it is and how it works. Copyright law at US
• Round Table: The public domain in Spain: theory and reality. By Ramon Casas
• Presentation: NARA’s holdings: how to consult its collection and survive
• Presentation: NARA and images from our past. Practical examples
• Presentation: How to access the NARA’s collection without travelling to the US

If you are working on a film with archival footage, you can apply for Carol Swain to make a practical example in order to research material for your project.

MEMORIMAGE WILL MAKE A SELECTION AMONG ALL THE PROJECTS PRESENTED BEFORE 21st OCTOBER

Visit the website at http://www.memorimagefestival.org