[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_original","fid":"17771","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"320","style":"font-size: 75%; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.538em;","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"480"}}]]The characteristical UNAM library building.
Conference report of the international conference “Archivos digitales sustentables”
The university UNAM in Mexico’s capital is, much like the city itself, a sprawling, bustling place of hardly imaginable size. With 350.000 students and 40.000 professors, it is a city in and of itself within one of the world’s largest urban areas - Mexico City counts up to 21 million inhabitants, more than the Netherlands’ full size. Within the UNAM, the Institute for Library and Information Research or IIBI is responsible for disseminating and researching information behaviour.
Under this mission, and under the inspiration of Dr. Perla Rodríguez, one of the founding members of Mexico’s national sound archive, the Fonoteca Nacional, it organized a conference on sustainable digital archives last week. With a main focus on Latin-American archives, the three-day conference welcomed speakers and participants from archives across this vast country and different nations on the continent, as well as from Europe, Australia and Japan.
Professional competences
Did I mention Mexico is an enormous country? Its 120 million inhabitants speak up to 69 languages in different language families. This variety translates into its culture as well as its heritage collections. While national institutions such as the Cineteca, the national archives (AGN) and the organisation for conservation (INAH) are enormous organisations, many underfunded and overlooked collections and communities remain to be found.
Roundtable on sustainability challenges with Jenny T. Guerra, Jo Ana Morfín and Mariza De La Mora.
For the Latin American continent, the country is a spearpoint of knowledge production, in which the UNAM plays an important role. In the last few years, Mexico City hosted a SOIMA training workshop and the SIPAD conference, which brought another impressive schedule of speakers together. This time around, Ray Edmonson was present to open the conference. A well-travelled archivist, it was about his sixth visit to the country and his opening address described the state of the domain today. Wat rung true to me was his assertion that audiovisual archivists have always had to work with and find solutions for technological change - not the other way around.
The conference comes at a time in which the big wave of digitization has more or less halted. Dr. Rodriguez explained that people know the technologies and the quality needed to digitize collections (although perhaps not at the scale and the speed necessary, given the precious time that remains), but rarely have a grip on means, tools, processes to ensure that, once digitized, or produced digitally, content is monitored and checked regularly. The workshops given in this framework given by yours truly, Jo Ana Morfin from the Chopo Museum & Amira Arratia from Chile’s public broadcaster TVN were therefor meant to improve the level of professional competence and gave participants a glimp on metadata processes and preservation strategies.
View on campus from the conference floor of the humanities building
One of the most riveting talks (that I sadly missed - choices!) came from the Tijuana Computer science lab duo Abraham Montoya Obeso from the National Polytechnic Institute who, together with their research counterparts in Bordeaux, won last year’s TRECvid challenge. In it, computer vision scientists take off against each other to see who advanced the most in making machines interpret what they see. The university provides regional archives with storage possibility and by experimenting on the dataset that results from it, enriches the collections with automagically created metadata. The technology already recognizes horses and oxes in movement and is being expanded to include buildings from pre- as well as post-Colombian eras and different types of regional folkloric dances.
Local Context
The most hunting talk in my view came from TVN’s Amira Arratia, who told chilling tales of how the broadcaster, after the Pinochet dictatorship, had to restore and retrieve its partly destroyed archives. Mexican Fonoteca subdirector Benjamín Muratalla showed some examples of the rich sound heritage that can be found across the Mexican landscape. Margarita Valdovinos Alba, an anthropologist by training, gave some examples of how quickly technologies dissolve, by talking at length about how many recordings of regional stories and songs were once recorded on the assumedly safe but short-lived MiniDisc format. Francisco Esquivel del Reyo showed through some examples how important access and awareness are for audiovisual collections. Another interesting talk came from Mariza De La Mora Mondragón who gave a brief overview of the legal possibilities and challenges of the law in preserving audiovisual collections in Mexico.
Sustainability issues
The law is usually present in its many forms, and can be of benefit or a challenge. Hitomi Matsuyama gave a status update of the film digitization project Japan’s National Film Center is putting in place. Most challenging, she indicated, was the lack of a legal deposit for the country’s enormous film legacy, and since productions are being created more and more with digital tools, a crevass has come into being of independent and recent productions that are not being stored.
Session on indigenous sound collections
Ina’s Daniel Teruggi had many allegories up his sleeve to illustrate the challenges that audiovisual archivists face in keeping collections safe and accessible. His saying that “never before have humans cared so much about preserving what they create” rung true to me, as well as his words of wisdom that every archive has its own “current” and therefor needs to find its own solutions and guidance for the collections they keep. Another important example he gave was that institutions like his are usually seen as rich, therefor not in need. His lesson that the budgets for digitizing Ina’s collections didn’t fall from the sky but only came through after ardent political conversations paired with a massive public awareness campaign, sounded most important to know in a region where some organisations or whole areas of creative output are yet to get to the cusp of this process.
Collaboration & Despedida
I had the honour to present the EUscreenXL and Europeana Sounds projects as examples of cross-boder as well as cross-domain collaborations. Only later did it turn out that the region had some collaborative projects of their own. The Fonoteca Nacional built up both a national network of sound archives that provides both localized and global access to its web platform Fonoteca itinerante, as well as an educational platform.
Speakers and conference guests in the UNAM botanical garden
In all, the three conference days and preceding workshops did not just provide a rich tasting of Mexico’s cuisine and the excellent and charming company of both organizers and participants, but quite a taste of the varieties of organizational, technical and cultural differences that exist in the wide expanse of Latin America’s audiovisual collections. It is encouraging to see that UNAM has taken up a role in the professional development of audiovisual archivists from all over - and I look forward to the January 2017 edition of the conference.
More info
- My slides on EUscreen and Europeana Sounds: https://t.co/CFdlQQuX3Q
- Official symposium website (in Spanish): http://iibi.unam.mx/micrositio/CIADS/
- IIBI on Facebook, with links to the recorded livestreams
- Visit the Twitter wall or search for the hashtag #CIADS_UNAM to improve your Spanish
All photos CC BY-SA by the author.