The 45th Annual conference of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) was held at the historic National Library of South Africa's Centre for the Book, 4-10 September 2014. The location in Cape Town provided a fitting backdrop for the conference theme and objective: 'Connecting Cultures: Content, Context, and Collaboration'. Professionals from all over the world came together to discuss issues and share results with regards to time based media heritage. Sound & Vision attended the conference and had the opportunity to present a paper on creative re-use of archival sound materials from the Netherlands and the UK.
South Africa's Centre for the Book, Cape Town
The topic of this years conference offered a rich programme with paper presentations and tutorials ranging from issues regarding preservation and digitisation to community engagement and re-use of our cultural heritage. Following a keynote address by Verne Harris, Director of the Research & Archive, Nelson Mandela Foundation, Johannesburg, the first session was opened by Lizabé Lambrechts from Stellenbosch University where she spoke about 'Curating the Hidden Years Music Archive: Challenges and Opportunities'. The Hidden Years Music Archive Project (HYMAP) is an exciting new archival project that aims to open up the 3rd Ear / David Marks collection for researchers, musicians, artists and students on a national and international level. The collection contains irreplaceable material documenting the popular music scene in South Africa between 1960 and 2005. The project has indeed many challenges, but even greater opportunities as this collection will now be made available to scholars for the first time. The process to document, digitise, store and make available this collection will be an interesting one to follow and for which thankfully many best practices, standards and initiatives exist.
The conference provided a good opportunity for the National Film, Video and Sound Archives of South Africa to celebrate 50 years of Archival Preservation of Audiovisual Records. Nthabiseng Ncala from the University of KwaZulu Natal spoke about the av collection developments, progress and achievements, but also the challenges for the future and identifying future preservation possibilities. The issues regarding preservation of audiovisual heritage are also addressed by international initiatives such as PrestoCentre. This membership-driven organisation has an active international community that is dedicated to maintain long-term access to audiovisual heritage.
A personal address was given by Marie O'Connell. 'The Day the Earth Moved Under Our Feet' speaks about the recovery operation of the New Zealand Film Archive after a heavy earthquake hit Christchurch in 2010. It was a huge task of physically piecing back the jigsaw of about 70.000 items, and how they worked in tandem with their cataloguers to ensure all sorted items were married up to carriers in their archive database.
Screenshot of Sound Connections - bird sounds
Lizzy Komen, from the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision, presented 'The Social Networks Pilot: Creative Re-use of Dutch and British Sound Archives'. Sound Connections (as it's currently called) is a pilot that explores new ways for existing communities to interact with archival sound materials using an interactive map based interface. Sound collections from the British Library and Sound & Vision are used. Visitors can share their knowledge about the sounds, enrich it with a picture, a video or a comment. Other sources can come from platforms such as Europeana, Wikipedia or Flickr. There are currently three sub-themes, including bird sounds, aviation and city soundscapes of London and Amsterdam. To showcase creative re-use of cultural heritage materials available via Europeana even further, Sound & Vision commissioned Australian artist Andy Thomas to create an inspirational digital sound sculpture using two bird sounds from the Sound & Vision archive. The video can also be viewed on the Open Images platform of Sound & Vision.
Nightingale and Canary from Andy Thomas on Vimeo.
The conference provided next to inspirational talks and workshops, also a cultural programme including music performances by teaspoon guitarist Hannes Coetzee & All in One. If you are interested to learn more about the many interesting presentations and other activities during IASA 2014, then please take a took at the following slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/karendtoit/iasa-2014-cape-town-south-africa.&…;Or, check out this Storify https://storify.com/karentoittoit/iasa-2014 which is a compilation of shares via Twitter. Both reports were curated by Karen du Toit, South Africa's International Librarians Network coordinator.