- 7 Tips to Ensure Your Video Is Usable in the Long Term n the past year, we have witnessed an unprecedented amount of media created by activists, citizen journalists, oral historians, and others who are documenting contemporary protest movements worldwide. As the volume of material continues to grow, questions about how to find, identify, verify, organize, and maintain this media for use as evidence and as historical documentation have become more pressing than ever.
- In the News: Authenticating Video Footage as Evidence in Sri Lanka Over the past two years, mobile phone footage of alleged human rights violations in Sri Lanka has been at the center of a conversation regarding the evidentiary value of amateur video.
- Human Rights Archives: Report from SAA, Part 1 Last week, I attended the annual conference of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) in Washington, DC. There were a number of sessions relevant to human rights archives and archivists this year, most notably the inaugural meeting of the new Human Rights Archives Roundtable, and the panel it organized with the Latin American and Caribbean Cultural Heritage Archives Roundtable, entitled "Silence No More! Archives Threatened by Political Instability."
- Srebrenica: A Forensic Reconstruction Now on Exhibit at Open Society Archive In July 1995, over 8,000 Muslim men and boys were systematically slaughtered on grounds of ethnicity in and around Srebrenica in roughly 72 hours by units of the Bosnian Serb Army.
- 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, […]
- 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.
- Archiving cellphone video Earlier this week amateur cellphone video surfaced corroborating that casualties suffered in the August 22 US airstrike on the Afghan village of Azizabad were much higher than the military has been willing to admit. The Times published a piece by Carlotta Gall "Evidence Points to Civilian Toll in Afghan Raid," which also includes a link to some of the video (edited due to graphic content).
