- "We work in the fourth dimension": interview with Ian Wilson The UNESCO Courier recently published this interview with Ian Wilson, Librarian and Archivist of Canada, who was elected President of the International Council of Archives (ICA) in July 2008. Wilson discusses how archives are important to human rights struggles and to communal and historical memory.
- Video leads to NYPD indictment Last summer’s video of NYPD officer Patrick Pogan attacking a cyclist has resulted in Pogan’s indictment. The video, viewed over 1.6 million times on YouTube, clearly showed Pogan attacking the cyclist, brutally and without provocation. I-Witness Video has more on their blog.
- "Treatment of History a Bellwether of Human Rights" The International Coalition of Sites of Conscience has distributed this statement pertaining to the recent raid and seizure of Human Rights Center Memorial's archive (thanks Bryan and Sam for forwarding):
- Intl Forum on Archives & Human Rights I spent several days last week at the International Forum on Archives and Human Rights in Mexico City. Although originally billed as an international conference to bring to together up to 500 archivists and others, it was in fact a small gathering, with only a handful of attendees from outside of Mexico, no prior promotion, […]
- War Behind Me The New York Times Book section reviewed a book by Deborah Nelson about her investigation into war crimes in Vietnam in the archive of the University of Michigan. She points out that here, the archive was used, in a way, not to unfold the cases and sentence those responsible, but for covering up the atrocities […]
- from Mexico City… I marked the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights here in Mexico City, at the conference International Forum on Archives and Human Rights. One of the people I met is Robin Kirk, Director of the Duke University Human Rights Center, whose blog from the conference is here. I’ll write some thoughts of […]
- Grace's First Skype Interview! Grace Lile, our Media Archive Manager, appeared on BoingBoing TV this week, performing her first Skype interview ever. She talks about the importance of the archive for human rights campaigning and the activities surrounding the 60th Anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights. You can watch the interview at http://www.boingboing.net/2008/12/11/bbtv-xeni-interviews-1.html
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights at 60: what image opened your eyes to human rights? On December 10th, 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In commemoration WITNESS offers this short video featuring footage from the Media Archive. What image opened your eyes to human rights? Join the conversation by commenting or posting your own video response.
- Archives of human rights NGO seized by Russian police The St. Petersburg offices of the prominent human rights group Memorial were raided on Thursday by Russian security forces. (Memorial in Grozny is a WITNESS partner.) According to Human Rights Watch: “In the morning of December 4, 2008, seven masked men, armed with batons, broke into the office of the Memorial Research and Information Center […]
- Archives, power & memory “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory.” – Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever. Clifford Levy’s November 26 NY Times article about renewed control and suppression of the archives in the Putin era chillingly illustrates Derrida’s thesis: “TOMSK, Russia: For years, the earth in this Siberian city had been giving […]
- Notes on AMIA 2008: Part 2 A few more session highlights: New Media Distribution Technologies. Brian Newman of Tribeca Film Institute gave a great presentation on Re:frame. Archivists, filmmakers, and distributors of independent film should know about Re:frame, which is making all kinds of previously unavailable or hard-to-find independent film available via DVD on demand and download to own/rent. WITNESS is […]
- Digital Asset Management and Institutional Repositories It’s been a week packed with info sessions, as last week not only brought together moving image archivists from all over North America at the AMIA conference, but also featured a smaller scale workshop in the Metropolitan New York Area. 55 archivists from various domains gathered at NYU for the NY Archivist’s Round Table on […]
- Notes from AMIA 2008: Part 1 Back from the 2008 Association of Moving Image Archives conference (AMIA) in Savannah, a beautiful city. No archive visits, but then Savannah is an archive in itself, and extremely rich in metadata, eg: It was a good conference. A couple of themes were dominant. Key for me was the focus on archiving in the context […]
- Stories that must be told: archives & records in post-conflict and peacekeeping The 2nd newsletter of the ICA Human Rights Working group is now available; the highlight is the text of a paper presented by Tom Adami at the ICA Congress last July in Kuala Lumpur. Adami spent eight years as archivist/information manager at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and is now working for the […]
- World Day For Audiovisual Heritage: Human Rights Archives Today, October 27, is World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, established by UNESCO in 2007 to highlight the importance of film, video, television, radio and all other forms of audiovisual media to global culture, history, and communication; and to call attention to the vulnerability of this media, due to neglect, deterioration, a lack of human or […]
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.