- New & of Note An update on the disposition of the archives of the International Criminal Tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda is available; see The Documentalist for a good summary, courtesy of James Simon.
- Voices of Rwanda video testimony project Our series of video interviews relating to archives and human rights continues on the Hub, with Taylor Krauss, founder/director of Voices of Rwanda.
- Memory and Justice: ICTJ launches new website The International Center for Transitional Justice has recently launched a new website, called Memory and Justice. The site includes a database of information about selected memory sites - public memorials, sites of memory/conscience, and similar accountability projects - and is also intended as a space for highlighting and engendering discussion “about the emerging field of memorialization as a form of accountability for past atrocity.”
- Reaching Out at AMIA On November 4-7, I attended the Association of Moving Image Archivists’ (AMIA) Conference in St. Louis, Missouri. Since AMIA is based in the US, and most of its conferences are held here, most attendees are American or Canadian.
- Copyright: three great new resources Copyright Watch: Hosted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, CW includes a user-friendly database of national copyright laws from around the world, and a blog; the site is intended to be a place to share information about copyright legislation and developments on a global level.
- AMIA 2009: random notes We are back from the 2009 Association of Moving Image Archivists conference in St Louis, which concluded Saturday. By we I mean myself, my WITNESS co-archivist Yvonne Ng, and our phenomenal interns Michele DeLia, Teague Schneiter and Valentina Catena.
- Khmer Legacies: Interview with Socheata Poeuv The Hub is currently featuring a video interview with Socheata Poeuv, a visiting fellow at the Yale University Genocide Studies Program. Poeuv is the founder and director of Khmer Legacies, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the history of the Cambodian genocide by recording video testimonials of its survivors.
- Non-custodial archiving: U Texas and Kigali Memorial Centre Non-custodial archival practices and the UT Libraries Human Rights Documentation Initiative partnership with the Kigali Memorial Centre
- Building a Network for Human Rights Archives and Archivists In recent years, archival institutions and organizations have become increasingly concerned with issues regarding human rights records and archival collections.
- World Day for Audiovisual Heritage: Archiving for Human Rights Today is World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, started in 2005 by UNESCO in order to help "build global awareness of the various issues at stake in preserving audiovisual heritage." These issues include deterioration and loss due to time, handling, improper storage, format obsolescence, and poor documentation, and they continue to threaten much of the world’s moving image heritage.
- Your Archive Deserves Advocacy Tomorrow is UNESCO World Day for Audivisual Heritage. Our good friends at Audiovisual Preservation Solutions have issued a callout for stories of audiovisual preservation as part of a "project designed to garner support for audiovisual archive preservation planning and project implementation from influencers, policy makers and funding organs," which they have christened YOUR ARCHIVE DESERVES ADVOCACY (YADA).
- The magic of documenting documentation Guest post from Sarah Van Deusen Philips: As the project coordinator for human rights at the Center for Research Libraries-Global Resources Network, my primary task is to engage with the life-cycle of human rights documents, which I do through our Electronic Resources Study. In this study, I am busy speaking to human rights field workers, […]
- Re-Stalinization and revisionism in Russia Last week Russian historian Mikhail Suprun was arrested by Russia's FSB security service for - as Truthdig put it - daring to study Russian history; more specifically, Stalin's gulags. Suprun's archives were confiscated; a police official who provided access to archive documents about gulag victims was also arrested. Suprun faces up to four years in jail if convicted.
- Amnesty International Asset Management System The International Secretariat of Amnesty International has launched their new digital asset management system, called ADAM; while mostly an intranet serving AI sections worldwide, there is a public site with a small selection of searchable content. See the Documentalist for a full description.
- Mandela opens archives for new book The personal archive of Nelson Mandela will be opened for a new memoir; rights the collection of diaries, letters and other writings were auctioned this week at the Frankfurt Book Fair. From the Guardian UK: “Mandela himself, who bestowed these “traces of my life and those who have lived it with me” on his eponymous […]
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.