Students from the MA programme Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image participated in the 2014 World Conference of FIAT/IFTA. They share their impressions in a series of blog reports. Aleksas Gilaitis wrote about the closing sessions.
After lunch time on the last day of FIAT/IFTA conference came the time for mysterious third keynote session. I’m saying mysterious, because no information about it on neither schedule nor speakers list was ever present.
The World's Memory
Apparently, it was a two-part session, presenting two very different topics. First up was Vincent Wintermans from the Netherlands UNESCO commission. He started with a general presentation of UNESCO and its mission, then quickly concentrated on its projects related to the archive world. He spent most of his talk on the Memory of the World register. Mainly concentrating on documents, the Memory of the World register recently started to deal with more and more of audiovisual material. Wintermans gave some examples of audiovisual items already registered for the project. Since most of the items on the list are not from the broadcast field, he took his chance to ask the audience for valuables in their collections. Additionally, he mentioned a project called UNESCO Persist, which is concentrated on the more technical side of heritage preservation. While the Memory of the World register is looking for items to save, Persist is trying to solve the problems in the field of policy making, archive related technology and metadata.
Mr. Wintermans' presentation was followed by Brecht Declercq who presented a very thorough update on last year's FIAT/IFTA survey. Statistics covered information from 43 archives, explaining slow but positive progress of the archives towards the best imaginable archive possible. Daniel Teruggi did express his hopes for raising the number archives involved in this survey twice or even more, and I wish his hopes will be reached in further years. On Twitter, the presentation led to a call for bundling survey efforts across AV organisations. This year’s results were concluded with several problems, that statistics showed very clearly – legal issues to store in the cloud; unclear situations in archives in less developed countries and development of tools to collect metadata.
Brecht Declercq presents on the MMC Commission's annual survey. Photo Credit: Oscar Timmers.
Save your archive
After a short coffee break, the same room was filled with people fascinated to “Save Archives” – a discussion moderated by the Chair of the Save Your Archive Programme, Bríd Dooley. After a short introduction, Dominique SaintVille took over the stage. She shared her knowledge of and experiences with save endangered archives. She found the past decade a critical one in the world of television archives. A decade when digital had its turning point absorbing analog, and when urgent awareness of film decomposition took place.
Both of these turned television archiving into even more expensive activity than before. The beginning of this millennium was noticeably crucial for African archives, that luckily got noticed. Dominique SaintVille enlisted a number of projects working on endangered archives. To mention at least one, she worked on saving the CAMSTL archive in East Timor, which has a big collection of documentary footage from the times of the nation's independence. Her work was applauded by the audience and other speakers.
Archives at Risk
Her personal experiences were later contextualized by the Co-ordination Council of Audiovisual Archives Associations (CCAAA) representative Sue Malden and Vincent Wintermans, who spent part of their stage time to explain the complexity of their institutions. Their two-sided presentations gave a broad understanding of the activities that took place in CCAAA and UNESCO in recent years, while not forgetting to raise awareness of what is not yet done. One of the most up-to-date case of endangered archive, as Sue Malden said, is case of Tunis, where big part of its national footage is “doomed to disappear”. In the end of this sad but inspiring session, she mentioned a newly launched website: www.archiveatrisk.com, which is giving a chance to underdeveloped/endangered archives to get attention and help.
After the session, one of the African delegates Hamet Ba took a chance to show the gratefulness for all the help and support to West African archives from FIAT/IFTA members, and with his example he perfectly closed the session of “Saving Archives”. After this, president Jan Müller concluded the event and invited its visitors to next year's conference in Vienna.
Sue Malden from FOCAL and the CCAAA. Photo Credit: Oscar Timmers.
More info
- See more photos, presentations and papers over at the FIAT/IFTA website