IASA's 55th Annual Conference

This session consists of 3 presentations and a joint Q&A with the presenters. The session contains:

➺ Ann Hardy - Unlocking an Audio-Visual Television News Archive (Long presentation)

➺ Karen Cariani - Amplifying diverse stories to a variety of audiences and users (Long presentation)

➺ Mamotshabo Johanna Boloka - Challenges associated with access to audiovisual documents for visually impaired users in South African archives. (Short presentation)


**Abstracts:**


➺ Unlocking an Audio-Visual Television News Archive
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Ann Hardy (Long presentation)
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The paper shares experiences and strategies undertaken at the University of Newcastle to enable staff and students to search the NBN Television Archive via ‘Whizzard’ - a world first video content discovery and playlist solution to search Television news content. A collaboration between university Library, IT Services and Linius to create a search tool to unlock historic audio-visual archive. Unlike other video products with playlist-based experiences, this search tool provides access to News content from 1982 to 1995. Users are in complete control of their viewing experience, enabling them to deep-dive into videos and identify 'moments' relevant to their search, which are then stitched together into compilation videos to watch and share. This pilot project unlocking a television archive and sharing the social lives of people in the Hunter region, giving users unbridled opportunity to curate relevant content into playlists that can be shared or saved for future use.

➺ Amplifying diverse stories to a variety of audiences and users
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Karen Cariani (Long presentation)
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The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) preserves American public television and radio and provides access to the American public on the AAPB website. With over 160,000 files representing the geographic, cultural and social diversity of the American public, the AAPB provides an invaluable resource for educators, journalists, scholars, filmmakers, and the inquisitive general public.

This rich and complex array of content presents equally complex archival challenges. In managing the needs of its different user and contributor communities, the AAPB must navigate the complexities of managing metadata at scale, the technological challenges of providing different levels of virtual access, and, of course, numerous copyright constraints. Although much of the content can be streamed from the website, more than half the collection can only be viewed onsite at the Library of Congress or GBH, with limited exceptions for time-bounded scholarly usage. Nonetheless, despite these limitations AAPB content is having a concrete impact on scholarship, filmmaking, science research, education, and more.

This presentation will provide examples of how various different communities are making use of AAPB content, uncovering little known stories and voices, and discuss the AAPB’s strategies for dealing with its access limitations and reaching a wide array of users.


➺ Challenges associated with access to audiovisual documents for visually impaired users in South African archives.
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Mamotshabo Johanna Boloka (Short presentation)
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Access to information in archives and any other information centre is crucial for every citizen including the visually impaired people. This qualitative study reports on challenges associated with access to audiovisual materials in South African archives by the visually impaired citizens. Through semi-structured interviews, data was collected from the selected archivists in South Africa. The collected qualitative data was presented and analysed thematically. Findings indicate that South African archives do not cater for visually impaired users. It was found that due to financial constraints emanating from budget cuts by the South African government, all materials in the archives are not user friendly for the visually impaired users. This study recommends that the South African government provides funding to ensure access to visually impaired users.