archives Archives - Page 7 of 9

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. WITNESS April 30, 2009
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. WITNESS April 28, 2009
The past is not past On March 26, a day after Guatemala’s Human Rights Ombudsman Sergio Morales released the first report on the contents of the National Police Archives, his wife was abducted and tortured. If anyone doubts the relevance of records and archives to the present, not only in redressing the past but as factors in ongoing terror and […] WITNESS April 7, 2009
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?" WITNESS April 1, 2009
Garbage bag of history There's a wonderful quote in a Talk of the Town piece in this week's New Yorker. The piece covers the opening of an exhibit of work by the late Pulitzer Prize-winning Vietnam War photographer Eddie Adams; many of the images have never been displayed before, having been not long ago discovered in plastic garbage bags in the garage of Adams' first wife. WITNESS March 27, 2009
Archives lead to arrests in Guatemalan disappearance case In a stunning development springing from the discovery of the Guatemalan Secret Police Archives, The National Security Archive the National Security Archive has posted declassified U.S. documents in a 25-year old disappearance case. Edgar Fernando García, a student leader and trade union activist, was captured by Guatemalan security forces in 1984 during the height of the state-sponsored terrorism of the Guatemalan civil war. The documents show that García’s capture was an organized political abduction orchestrated at the highest levels of the Guatemalan government. WITNESS March 19, 2009
Upcoming events: archiving, open video, oral history and more There are a number of recently-announced conferences or workshops coming up in 2009 which are worth checking out: SOIMA 2009: Safeguarding Sound and Image Collections November 17 – December 11, 2009 New Delhi, India This 4-week course will provide an overview of issues related to the preservation and access of sound and image materials e.g., […] WITNESS March 17, 2009
Human Rights Archives: 3 US collections Robin Kirk of the Duke Center for Human Rights writes about Duke’s Archive for Human Rights on her blog, Talking Rights. She has also posted links to recordings of presentations from the recent Forum on Human Rights in Mexico City, which I posted about here. Listen to human rights archivists from three US academic collecting […] WITNESS February 13, 2009
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. WITNESS January 26, 2009
"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. WITNESS January 5, 2009
"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): WITNESS December 19, 2008
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, […] WITNESS December 16, 2008
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 […] WITNESS December 12, 2008
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 […] WITNESS December 12, 2008
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 […] WITNESS December 5, 2008