- Open Video Conference: human rights in an open video culture. Lots of great stuff on tap at this week's Open Video Conference (June 19-20, NYU). My WITNESS colleagues Sam Gregory and Sameer Padania will speak on the panel "Human Rights, Indigenous Media and Ethics in Video: Dilemmas, Challenges and Opportunities:"
- Human rights archives/archivists at SAA 2009 From the ICA Archives and Human Rights blog, for archivists of human rights collections: Dear colleagues, Hello, my name is T-Kay Sangwand and I’m the new Human Rights Archivist at the University of Texas Libraries. I am writing to see if any list members will be attending the Society of American Archivists annual meeting taking […]
- Why isn't everything digitized yet? A few weeks ago Indicommons featured an excellent blog post by Deborah Wythe, Head of Digital Collections and Services at the Brooklyn Museum. She poses the question many of us frequently hear: Why isn't everything digitized yet? She then proceeds with a nicely articulated description of some of the challenges, then quantifies them:
- Archives as Medium I recently stumbled upon Essays: Archives as Medium , on the web site Old Messengers, New Media: The Legacy of Innis and McLuhan (in turn part of Library and Archives Canada online.) From Lance Strate's essay The Medium is the Memory:
- Archiving Project: Burma Humanitarian Mission This report is from Jenn Blaylock, NYU Moving Image Archiving & Preservation Program: As my time interning at WITNESS Media Archive comes to a close I thought I’d share the details of the archival project that I’ve been working on with the archival blogosphere. Simply put, I organized and digitized a collection of over forty-six […]
- Conference: Memory, Archives, Human Rights In Copehagen Denamrk, and Malmö, Sweden, June 4-5, 2009: Archives, Memory and Human Rights.
- Citizen Archivists: MiT6 Notes, part 2 Another thematic thread from MIT6, MIT's Media in Transition conference, highlighted by Rick Prelinger (Prelinger Library, Prelinger Archives) at the 2nd plenary, Archives and History.
- Immediacy & Persistence: MIT6 Notes part 1 I spent last Friday Saturday and a bit of Sunday at MIT 6, the 6th biennial Media in Transition gathering convened by MIT’s Comparative Media Studies (CMS) program.
- The past is not past On March 26, a day after Guatemala’s Human Rights Ombudsman Sergio Morales released the first report on the contents of the National Police Archives, his wife was abducted and tortured. If anyone doubts the relevance of records and archives to the present, not only in redressing the past but as factors in ongoing terror and […]
- Conference: Media in Transition 6 at MIT Media in Transition: April 24 - 26, at MIT. Excerpt from the conference description: " What challenges confront librarians and archivists who must supervise the migration of print culture to digital formats and who must also find ways to preserve and catalogue the vast and increasing range of words and images generated by new technologies? How are shifts in distribution and circulation affecting the stories we tell, the art we produce, the social structures and policies we construct?"
- Garbage bag of history There's a wonderful quote in a Talk of the Town piece in this week's New Yorker. The piece covers the opening of an exhibit of work by the late Pulitzer Prize-winning Vietnam War photographer Eddie Adams; many of the images have never been displayed before, having been not long ago discovered in plastic garbage bags in the garage of Adams' first wife.
- Archives lead to arrests in Guatemalan disappearance case In a stunning development springing from the discovery of the Guatemalan Secret Police Archives, The National Security Archive the National Security Archive has posted declassified U.S. documents in a 25-year old disappearance case. Edgar Fernando García, a student leader and trade union activist, was captured by Guatemalan security forces in 1984 during the height of the state-sponsored terrorism of the Guatemalan civil war. The documents show that García’s capture was an organized political abduction orchestrated at the highest levels of the Guatemalan government.
- Upcoming events: archiving, open video, oral history and more There are a number of recently-announced conferences or workshops coming up in 2009 which are worth checking out: SOIMA 2009: Safeguarding Sound and Image Collections November 17 – December 11, 2009 New Delhi, India This 4-week course will provide an overview of issues related to the preservation and access of sound and image materials e.g., […]
- Human Rights Archives: 3 US collections Robin Kirk of the Duke Center for Human Rights writes about Duke’s Archive for Human Rights on her blog, Talking Rights. She has also posted links to recordings of presentations from the recent Forum on Human Rights in Mexico City, which I posted about here. Listen to human rights archivists from three US academic collecting […]
- Documenting Truth: new Publication from ICTJ The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) has just released Documenting Truth, a report of best practices for human rights documentation. The 30-page report is the result of work by the Documentation Affinity Group (DAG), a peer-to-peer network of six diverse NGOs: the ICTJ, the Documentation Center of Cambodia, the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala, Human Rights Education Institute of Burma, Humanitarian Law Center (Belgrade), and the Iraq Memory Foundation.
Archiving Human Rights
Posts from the WITNESS Media Archive whose mission is to collect, document, preserve and provide access to audiovisual human rights media in the support of advocacy, prosecution of justice, truthtelling and the historical record.
These posts are devoted to news of our activities and work, and to discussion of topics relevant to it, including human rights archives and documentation, audiovisual archiving, social issue documentary, the social justice responsibilities of archives and archivists, etc.
Posts are written by Grace Lile, Director of Operations; Yvonne Ng, Archivist; and occasional other contributors.