- Human Rights Electronic Evidence Study The Center for Research Libraries Global Resources Initiative is currently studying how NGOs and archiving institutions collect, manage and preserve digital human rights documentation, including blogs, social media, and video and other media from mobile devices; the project is described in significant depth on The Documentalist, the project's blog.
- Recommended: new book, new blog I am reading, with great pleasure, Randall Jimerson’s newly published Archives Power: Memory, Accountability and Social Justice (2009; Society of American Archivists). The book addresses the role of archives and archivists in society, and evolving perspectives on their relevance to larger issues of social justice. SAA’s blurb: “Grounded in historical and social theory, this analysis […]
- Columbia seeking Web Collection Curator for human rights project Columbia University Libraries has announced a grant-funded position to help develop infrastructure for web content collecting, including specifically in the area of human rights. Excerpt from the announcement: “The incumbent will work closely a second web collection curator, selectors, archivists, digital projects staff, senior managers, scholars and individuals in human rights organizations around the world […]
- 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.
- 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?"
- 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.
- 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, […]
- 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 […]
- New WITNESS Archive Intern My name is Ioannis Papaloizou and I am from Cyprus. My educational background is in film and video production (I obtained my Bachelor’s degree at the School of Visual Arts in New York) and more recently in “Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image” (prof. Master’s degree of the University of Amsterdam). At the university […]
- SAA2008: Random notes I did the Internet Archive “tour” Weds morning – nothing to tour really, as befits a digital archive; a colleague said, “they have a building?” – but presentations and Q&A in the Presidio office about the Books program, NASA Images project, and Archive-it, a subscription service allowing customized website crawling/archiving for organizations. A few things […]
- SAA2008: Meaning, Justice and John Dean I started the day with “What, Why, How? Archival Meaning in a R/Evolutionary Age” which featured three excellent papers exploring meaning, purpose and collective identity for archivists. I especially liked Scott Cline’s paper which explored what he called “archival being” the core values of which are faith, radical self-understanding, intention, and integrity; and illustrated via […]
- Event: visit to Archive for Human Rights at Duke Next week I’ll be visiting and speaking at the Archive for Human Rights at Duke University. I’ll be screening a recent Memorial/WITNESS video, Missing Lives: Disappearances and Impunity in the Northern Caucasus, and talk about some of the production and archiving processes and challenges; the announcement is here. I’m looking forward to seeing the Duke […]
