- Notes from the Association of Moving Image Archivists Conference WITNESS Media Archive Manager, Grace Lile, and I are attending the annual Association of Moving Image Archivists conference – held this year in Rochester, NY, the birthplace of Eastman Kodak. The conference, in its seventeenth year, draws over 500 media archivists, preservation lab technicians and others from around the world, and is an excellent forum […]
- Activist Archivists We did our session “Activism in the Archives: Working with Human Rights Collections” on Saturday. Patrick Stawski is the Human Rights Archivist at the Archive of Human Rights at Duke University. Patrick spoke about developing the collection there, and the importance of outreach and engagement. The AHR is now the home of the International Monitor […]
- Happy Labor Day I was privileged yesterday to hear the inimitable Studs Terkel on a panel about the Studs Terkel Oral History Center here in Chicago. He is an exemplar of the belief that the stories of ordinary people are important and meaningful, that they can be agents of social change, and that they should be documented and […]
- Digitization of Guatemala Police Archives Here is an update on one of the hopeful developments in Guatemala in years: the recovery of the secret archives of the Guatemalan National Police. Discovered by accident in 2005, the paper, audio and video documents may help shed light on thousands of murders and other crimes perpetrated during the civil war. Dating back to […]
- Blog Post 1 About the witness media archive blog: our purpose is to share news, developments, and upcoming events, and to discuss topics relating to our work: moving images archives, human rights archives, human rights documentation, preservation, digitization, metadata, social issue documentary, and a few other things I’m sure. Upcoming event: The Society of American Archivists Conference (SAA) […]
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.