By Grace Lile | May 16th, 2012 I’m excited to announce that starting today (May 16) through May 22 my fellow archivist Yvonne Ng and I will be co-hosting an online dialogue hosted by New Tactics in Human Rights titled Archiving Human Rights for Advocacy, Justice and Memory.
From New Tactics website page for "Archiving Human Rights" online dialogue
At WITNESS we’ve long incorporated archiving as an important component of our work, but generally speaking archives and preservation have taken a backseat to more urgent aspects of human rights advocacy. That is beginning to change; human rights archives are increasingly playing a pivotal role in advocacy, restorative justice, historical memory, and struggles against impunity.
At the same time, however, archivists and activists alike are grappling with the mounting challenges posed by the proliferation of digital documentation. For example, an overwhelming quantity of human rights video has emerged from the Arab Spring, from the Occupy movement, [...]
Continue reading Join WITNESS For An Online Dialogue On Archiving Human Rights
By Guest Blogger | January 27th, 2012 By Tessa Fallon
The web has given human rights organizations unprecedented access to global audiences. However a website will last only as long as funds are available for maintenance and hosting. Leaving aside practical challenges which exist for every website, in many places there is also the possibility of sabotage or attempts to remove a human rights-related website by opponents, religious, ideological, governmental or otherwise. Examples include denial-of-service attacks or in the most extreme case, the cutoff of all Internet service providers (the Internet “kill” switch).
Web Archiving
In 2009, Columbia University Libraries received a grant from the Mellon Foundation to explore web archiving program development. The collection at the center of our web archiving program is the Human Rights Web Archive. The initial and prevailing focus of this collection is websites of human rights NGOs. As the project progresses, we have also included national human rights institutions, truth commissions, [...]
Continue reading Archiving Human Rights on the Web
By Yvonne Ng | December 8th, 2011 This post is part of our Human Rights Day Series: Resources for #Video4Change Activists. More resources can be found on our website.
In the past year, we have witnessed an unprecedented amount of media created by activists, citizen journalists, oral historians, and others who are documenting contemporary protest movements worldwide. As the volume of material continues to grow, questions about how to find, identify, verify, organize, and maintain this media for use as evidence and as historical documentation have become more pressing than ever.
A New York-based collective known as the Activist Archivists, in collaboration with WITNESS, put together this list of tips for #OccupyWallStreet activists to create and share video in ways that support its discoverability, use, and long-term preservation. Many of these pointers are also included in our Top 10 Tips for Filming #Occupy Protests, Arrests, and Police Conduct, but it doesn’t hurt to repeat them!
Tips for [...]
Continue reading 7 Tips to Ensure Your Video Is Usable in the Long Term
By Grace Lile | September 26th, 2011 Inside the Media Archive is an ongoing, occasional behind-the-scenes look at the practices, methodologies, tools, and resources the WITNESS Media Archive has developed and implemented to manage our collection of human rights video documentation.
Cataloging is not exactly the sexiest hook for a blog post, I admit; even in the unglamorous world of archivists, things like digitization, curation and access tend to generate more excitement. Metadata, PBCore, checksums, XML, PREMIS…are you still with me?
Nonetheless: if you are, or have ever been, someone endeavoring to develop a set of principles and protocols for the purpose of managing a collection of complex materials, there’s often nothing more useful than looking at what others have done. While metadata standards and rule sets such as PBCore, METS, AMIM and others are important and useful, how they are deployed to manage a particular collection is a complex problem-solving challenge, especially in the digital audiovisual [...]
Continue reading Inside the Media Archive: our Cataloging Manual now available online
By Grace Lile | July 30th, 2011 On Monday this week the historic and long-awaited first trial of the International Criminal Court began in the Hague. In the dock is Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, a Congolese warlord accused of conscripting children under the age of 15 – some as young as seven – as soldiers in the civil war. [...]
Continue reading First ICC trial begins in the Hague
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