archives Archives - Page 5 of 9

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. Yvonne Ng November 17, 2009
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. WITNESS November 13, 2009
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. Yvonne Ng November 11, 2009
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. WITNESS November 2, 2009
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 WITNESS October 30, 2009
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. WITNESS October 28, 2009
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. Yvonne Ng October 27, 2009
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). WITNESS October 26, 2009
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, […] WITNESS October 20, 2009
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. WITNESS October 20, 2009
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. WITNESS October 16, 2009
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 […] WITNESS October 15, 2009
Archival access: ethics, rights, obligations Access is a primary archival value, driven by many things: legal or organizational mandates, copyright, available technology and resources, a deep-seated belief that access to information is the foundation of a free and educated society, and, in fact, a right. With human rights materials the challenges are particularly acute, sometimes pitting personal safety, security and […] WITNESS October 12, 2009
Archives & the problem of access in post-authoritarian regimes Guest post from Bruce P. Montgomery, author of Richard B. Cheney and the Rise of the Imperial Vice Presidency: As a matter of discussion, it may be instructive to look at how many post-authoritarian countries in Eastern Europe and elsewhere have addressed their archives of repression. In most cases, efforts to pass lustration laws and […] WITNESS October 7, 2009
The Torture Archive The National Security Archive has published and cataloged a remarkable collection of over 83,000 primary source documents relating to US policy and practices of detention, interrogation and torture during the so-called war on terror. “The goal of the The Torture Archive is to become the online institutional memory for essential evidence on torture. Specifically, the […] WITNESS October 4, 2009