This session consists of 5 presentations and a joint Q&A with the presenters. The session contains:
➺ Joshua Ng, Cynthia Wu, Karyn Lo, Victoria Chu - Preserving New Zealand's Audiovisual Heritage: The Utaina Project (Short presentation)
➺ Andreia Duarte - Tracing paths towards the dissemination of Portuguese sound memories on coarse grove discs: a contribution to overcome legal and bureaucratic barriers (Long presentation)
➺ Iva Horová - 100 years of futile effort. Will it be enough? (Short presentation)
**Abstracts:**
➺ Preserving New Zealand's Audiovisual Heritage: The Utaina Project
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Joshua Ng, Cynthia Wu, Karyn Lo, Victoria Chu (Short presentation)
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Embark on a journey through Utaina, a collaborative initiative spanning several years aimed at preserving New Zealand's at-risk audiovisual taonga (treasures) through digitization. This project represents a significant partnership between three prominent New Zealand institutions: Archives New Zealand, National Library of New Zealand, and Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision. Its mission is to secure these invaluable cultural artifacts for future generations. In this presentation, we will reveal the strategic alliance forged by these major institutions, combining their resources and expertise to secure essential funding for digitizing nearly 400,000 at-risk audiovisual items. Our objective is to share the experiences and insights gained during our three-year journey, offering practical lessons learned along the way. A notable aspect of the Utaina project is its successful collaboration with an international vendor specializing in large-scale digitization, who established operations within New Zealand. This approach not only brought about economies of scale but also addressed data jurisdiction concerns, a common challenge in extensive preservation efforts. Utaina serves as a valuable case study, illustrating how collaboration and innovative solutions can effectively protect a nation's audiovisual heritage. Our presentation provides an opportunity to explore the project's challenges, solutions, and successes, offering practical insights for the global audiovisual archiving community.
➺ Tracing paths towards the dissemination of Portuguese sound memories on coarse grove discs: a contribution to overcome legal and bureaucratic barriers
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Andreia Duarte (Long presentation)
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The University of Aveiro, a public university in Portugal, possesses one of the biggest institutionalized coarse groove disc collections in the country, while it is also one of the most representative of its type in what concerns Portuguese music. This collection has been growing since 2009 as a result of individual donations by private collectors, and there have been institutional efforts towards its preservation since then.
At the University of Aveiro, these sound carriers are digitally preserved from three main points of view: as archival objects, museum objects, and research objects, envisioning not only the preservation of the audio carriers and their contents, but also aiming to facilitate their accessibility as collective memory objects through an online digital catalogue with built-in added knowledge through research. This process has been implying the articulation of different knowledge domains: Information Science, Sound Studies, (Ethno)Musicology, Museology and Digital Humanities. In this process, there are multiple limitations, which range from lack of human resources to legal and bureaucratic challenges, and to financial and decision-making limitations. In recent years, the biggest challenge has been the dissemination of the immaterial contents of this collection.
This presentation aims to present the relevant legal and bureaucratic constraints faced in the process of disseminating coarse groove discs as collective memory objects, in Portugal, as per our experience, at the University of Aveiro. At the same time, it aims to discuss the construction of a model involving both technological, institutional, and national policy solutions, envisioning the possibility of it becoming a step forward towards unveiling national collective memory in memory and educational institutions.
➺ 100 years of futile effort. Will it be enough?
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Iva Horová (Short presentation)
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The presentation will start with short introducing of the monography with the Czech title The Archive, which was not. The book is one of the outputs in the frame of five-year project “New Phonograph. Listen to the sound of history” solved under the Czech National museum during years 2017-2022. That collective monography (ten authors, eight chapters, chronological outline, big English resume) covers more than hundred years of efforts to establish the Czech national sound institution to be responsible for the Czech national sound heritage. The book come out in the middle of the 2022 and there was no progress until then. We were forced to close the portal National Phonoteque, which aimed to be a branch information point In the same year.
We did not stop to push the idea during the next years. We started to negotiate direct with the Czech Ministry of Culture, the book was presented on TV, in the newspaper…. It seems we have achieved certain results, which I want to introduce you.
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