IASA's 55th Annual Conference

In a time of budget constraints across heritage projects worldwide, the preservation of sound collections is becoming an increasing challenge, especially for archives without existing digitisation solutions.

At the same time, advances in technology present opportunities to deviate from ‘traditional’ digitisation systems – the hardware and software commonly associated with audio production and preservation.

In response to this changing economic and technological environment, we have been investigating the potential of a low-cost and versatile solution for audio digitisation using the Raspberry Pi single-board computer.

We will share our findings about the viability, capability and utility of a low-cost, ARM Linux-based audio digitisation workstation to enable archives to achieve preservation-standard transfers without the overheads of a typical desktop computer system.

➺ Building Digital Preservation Capabilities: The DPC Competency Framework and Audit Toolkit
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Sarah Middleton (Workshop/Tutorial)
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The preservation of digital materials is not a static activity. To create an enduring archive of digital content requires constant advocacy effort and partnership to proactively manage the organizational and technological infrastructures we deploy - particularly in times of crisis, when resources are so stretched.

Applying a carefully considered approach to continuous improvement of digital preservation capabilities can greatly benefit practitioners when looking to set and achieve objectives, sharing and embedding this responsibility across whole organizations. This workshop aims to provide attendees with the skills and tools to develop and implement a methodology for continuous improvement at their organization.

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) has created resources to facilitate this process. The newest resource is the DPC Competency Framework with accompanying audit toolkit (DPC CAT) and example role descriptions.

The workshop will begin by providing attendees with an understanding of the importance and benefits of a continuous improvement approach to benchmarking their digital preservation capabilities. Following this, attendees will be provided with an introduction to the Competency Framework, before being guided through a practical exercise allowing them to audit their own digital preservation skills using DPC CAT. The workshop will finish with an overview of other DPC resources that can help practitioners with planning and advocating for their digital preservation activities.

This workshop will benefit individuals and organizations from across many sectors who wish to assess their current digital preservation capabilities and plan for future developments.

➺ Managing Collections with Audiovisual Metadata Tools
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Rebecca Fraimow (Workshop/Tutorial)
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As audiovisual content and formats become increasingly complex, the need to capture descriptive and technical metadata about audiovisual assets becomes ever-more pressing – and while asset management systems may come and go, the metadata contained in those systems shouldn’t disappear with them. This half-day workshop will focus on capturing accurate, standardized metadata that can be mapped and migrated between different systems using the PBCore schema.

Beginning with an introduction to key concepts in audiovisual metadata and a walk-through of the structure of the PBCore schema, the workshop will provide hands-on exercises in audiovisual cataloging using the PBCore Cataloging Tool to create XML records and MediaInfo to capture technical metadata about digital files. Attendees will learn about best practices for controlled vocabularies and standardized data fields, be presented with real-world use cases for PBCore records, and practice conceptual metadata mapping into databases.

Although the workshop will be presented in English, tools and resources will also be available in Spanish thanks to the NEH-funded PBCore Education and Training Project.

The 'Sound Safari' workshop is designed to offer a hands-on exploration of multimodal models and their applications in cataloging, information retrieval, and Artificial Intelligence. It enables attendees to delve into avant-garde AI-based technologies that convert images into both sound and textual descriptions. Through physical exploration and practical engagement, our goal is to nurture a deep-seated analysis of the consequences of these technologies, the emerging narratives they weave, spotlighting biases and the hurdles posed by non-standard images, and their ramifications for the automated cataloging of archives.

Furthermore, this workshop is dedicated to uncovering the wealth of interdisciplinary collaboration. It invites participants from diverse fields to contribute with their distinct viewpoints, thereby enriching the discourse and widening our collective insight into AI's significance within the realm of archival science.

Structured to be highly interactive, the workshop is divided into three parts: an introductory overview of multimodal models and their practical uses; a fieldwork excursion, wherein participants will walk around the conference environment to capture images, which they will then convert into sound, text and images again via AI models; culminating in a time for sharing and discussing the insights and outcomes derived from these activities.

To ensure participants can fully engage in the workshop, they are kindly asked to bring their laptops.

➺ Using AI to make spoken-word content more accessible and discoverable
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Mark Boas (Workshop)
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Generative AI coupled with more traditional AI such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) present unique opportunities for the categorisation, discoverability, accessibility and dissemination of spoken word media. In this workshop Mark Boas, CTO of TheirStory and co-founder of the Hyperaudio Project will discuss and demonstrate methods of exposing media in a form that facilitates search, sharing and even remixing using the open source tools he has been involved in developing for the last decade. The last 12 months has seen a sea change in the emergence of generative AI such as LLMs (Large Language Models), at the same time we’ve seen speech-to-text algorithms improve in accuracy and speed, while costs continue to fall.

His work at TheirStory, focussing on stories from underrepresented and marginalised communities, seeks to combine word-timed machine generated interactive transcripts with emerging generative AI to create metadata that facilitates the surfacing of content and its re-use in formats by students and other communities .

Believing that these technologies should be able to be leveraged by the wider community, much of this work adheres to open standards and has been released under open source licenses in forms that can be mixed, matched and integrated into other platforms.

Mark will take us on a whistle-stop tour of these new innovative technologies, explaining the concepts behind them – the pros and cons of each and inviting participants to try them out. Touching on the ethics of AI he’ll talk about the wider aim of engaging the oral-history archival community and fostering collaboration around open technologies to help expose this important aspect of our history.

We welcome all IASA members to join us for a presentation on the process of becoming a member of the TC.
The officers share the historical basis for the process, some weaknesses and flaws we've identified, and a process for developing solutions for a more robust and transparent process.
Following a formal presentation there will be a discussion seeking input from the IASA community.

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.

➺ Copyright Fair Use/Dealing: A brief global overview
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Allison Schein, Ilse Assmann , Perla Olivia Rodriguez, Shubha Chaudhuri (Panel session)
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Globally, some form of fair dealing or fair use governs how those who care for, manage, license, and allow a range of uses. Understanding the complexities of one country only sometimes translates to another. In this panel presentation, we aim to provide a review of the copyright law fair use or fair dealing in India, Africa, South America, Spain, and the United States so that members of our community will leave knowing the foundations of each country's laws. Ilse Assmann, Perla Olivia Roddriguez, Shubha Chaudhuri, and Allison Schein will address each of their country’s fair use or fair dealing laws, and a robust Q and A will follow.

This session consists of 4 presentations and a joint Q&A with the presenters. The session contains:

➺ Benjamin Amakye-Boateng - The Impact of Political Insecurity on Archival Access and Preservation: A Case Study of Bokoor Studios. (Long presentation)

➺ Ana Masiello - Audio preservation strategies in Latin America: Sustainable approaches adapted to our reality. (Short presentation)

➺ Simon Rogers, Curtis Sassur - Own your own sound: Imagining a DIY post-custodial archival network (Short presentation)

➺ Nurul Huda Abdullah - Decoding Malaysia's Audiovisual Archives in Creating National Unity (Short presentation)


**Abstracts:**


➺ The Impact of Political Insecurity on Archival Access and Preservation: A Case Study of Bokoor Studios.
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Benjamin Amakye-Boateng (Long presentation)
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Archives and cultural heritage institutions frequently face a perilous landscape as a result of political instability. This research investigates the impact of such disruption on the activities of Bokoor Studios, Ghana's pioneering archive committed to the preservation of African music history. The study focuses on how political upheaval and changes in government have impacted access to and preservation of the unique treasures held within Bokoor Studios. Drawing on historical data, interviews with key stakeholders, and archival record analysis, this study reveals the challenges posed by political instability, such as funding disruptions, threats to physical infrastructure, and an increased risk of censorship or loss of culturally significant materials. The instance of Bokoor Studios exemplifies the several ways in which political unrest can hinder the archiving process, ranging from logistical challenges to the more sinister prospect of cultural oblivion. Furthermore, the study delves into the tactics used by Bokoor Studios to address these issues, emphasising the importance of resilience, adaptability, and worldwide solidarity. Finally, the purpose of this study is to contribute to the larger discussion on the preservation of cultural archives in politically vulnerable contexts, by providing insights and tactics that might be used by similar institutions around the world. Through the perspective of Bokoor Studios, we acquire a better appreciation of the essential role that archives play in preserving cultural continuity and memory during times of political change.

➺ Audio preservation strategies in Latin America: Sustainable approaches adapted to our reality.
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Ana Masiello (Short presentation)
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Those involved in audio preservation in countries like Argentina are accustomed to working in crisis contexts and developing preservation strategies that consider the complex social, political, and economic landscape of Latin America. Particularly, the economic factor often plays a significant role in our decision-making processes.

International standards typically recommend storage conditions and materials for enclosures that are beyond our financial means or not readily available locally. As a result, we must employ creativity and research to develop alternative strategies that involve "adapting" materials originally intended for other purposes for conservation enclosures, or reusing and readapting original enclosure systems. Additionally, it is crucial to prioritize preservation strategies that are feasible for the institutions responsible for them.

In this way, our "sustainability" stems from the necessity and the belief that it is possible to develop sound preservation practices in our unique realities, which differ from others and must be addressed accordingly, always with the aim of preserving our sound heritage. In this presentation, I will share some of our experiences, both successful and unsuccessful, in developing these "non-ideal alternative preservation practices" in sound preservation. These strategies are tailored to the realities of Latin America and may prove beneficial to colleagues and institutions in the region and worldwide.

➺ Own your own sound: Imagining a DIY post-custodial archival network
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Simon Rogers, Curtis Sassur (Short presentation)
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Founded in 2020, The Toronto Information Network for Independent [TINI] Music Co-op has been slowly building capacity to support DIY archival documentation of the Toronto independent music community. Following on the collaborative research experience of building an outreach initiative, working with prototype archival projects in four identified constituencies (artists, venues, fans and archivists), and supervising a user experience [UX] design student working group project at the Faculty of Information in the University of Toronto, TINI co-founder and archivist Simon Rogers will present a talk on community documentation and building supports for a post-custodial archival program in the nonprofit sector. The short paper will focus on early project initial steps and the power of harnessing existing resources to build cheap and slow effective capacity to support the long term organization of community records in conjunction with pre-existing communities of practice. He will argue that letting go of traditional ownership models, in particular, can stimulate social innovation. He will also outline an academic support role for harnessing the strength of traditional archival practices without threatening loss of artistic agency or engagement because of perceived threats to ownership or autonomy through institutionalized archival collecting practices. This paper will examine the utility of post-custodial, multi-institutional metadata creation in building a dispersed archival network, with a low-barrier to access, especially in the long term preservation of digitized content and fragmentary analog materials with multiple creators such as zines, merchandise and concert ephemera.

➺ Decoding Malaysia's Audiovisual Archives in Creating National Unity
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Nurul Huda Abdullah (Short presentation)
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“Decoding Malaysia's Audiovisual Archives in Creating National Unity” refers to the process of understanding and interpreting audiovisual archives to foster a sense of national unity. This involves preserving and making accessible historical and cultural materials that are significant to a nation’s identity. Audiovisual archives, such as those managed by the National Archives of Malaysia (NAM), play a crucial role in this process. They preserve valuable materials like documentaries, films, commercials, and corporate video animations that capture various national historical events. These archives are seen as a shared resource, encouraging co-ownership and donations to complete the collection for future generations. However, despite its importance, the field of audiovisual archives often goes unnoticed and is overlooked by certain communities. Therefore, efforts are made to improve preservation practices, engage the younger generation, and expand community involvement through outreach programs. In essence, decoding these archives involves understanding their content and significance, and leveraging them as tools to unite communities. They serve as information hubs for analysing cultural, historical, and educational aspects, developing common ground across communities, and aiding in the preservation of cultural heritage.

Meeting agenda:

1. Welcome
2. Brief update on our joint project with the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) - a Universal Discographic Database (UDD)
3. Greetings/update from the ARSC discography committee
4. Introductions and sharing of work – attendees will have an opportunity to report on their work with databases, research or other discography-related topics (please prepare 5-minutes each, if you would like to participate).
5. Other news/updates

➺ Queering the Archive
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Rosie Rowe, Katherine C’Ailceta, Laura Batitucci, Dagmar Brunow (Panel session)
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Please join us for the first-ever “Queering the Archive” panel in IASA’s 55-year history, featuring speakers
Katherine C’Ailceta: Connecting Queer Collections in Aotearoa New Zealand: An overview of archiving organisations holding queer AV records in Aotearoa New Zealand
Dagmar Brunow: Lost in Collaboration? Countering the risks around queer archival ethics of care
Laura Batitucci: Focusing on the Queer Super-8 films Digitized by the Digitalização Viajante (Traveling Digitization) Project in Brazil
Rosie Rowe: Found in the news clips: Bunch and Bjorgum—Iowa’s  first unsuccessful attempt at legalizing gay marriage

This session consists of 2 presentations and a joint Q&A with the presenters. The session contains:

➺ Henrik Smith-Sivertsen, Katrine Hofmann Gasser - Re-writing Danish music history via free sound search (Long presentation)

➺ Carolyn Birdsall - Activating Histories of AV-Collections: From Enriched Metadata to Community Engagement (Short presentation)


**Abstracts:**


➺ Re-writing Danish music history via free sound search
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Henrik Smith-Sivertsen, Katrine Hofmann Gasser (Long presentation)
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Since the advent of the Internet mid 1990’s, free text search has been a central tool. First via indexes of online webpages in readable formats, then all sorts of digitized materials made searchable via OCR. However, written sources are by definition secondary sources, not least in relation to media archives. In this paper, we will demonstrate how the use of free sound search has been instrumental in two recent research projects on Danish music history, conducted at the Royal Danish Library.

The base is the tool xcorrSound. Via indexing of sound archives, it is possible to match sound files and perform searches into big amounts of data. Via a custom-built interface, the results are delivered in tables with relevant data, including a direct link to the file in the media archive and a custom-built media player, directly executing the files.

In this case, we used it to identify the use of specific songs in Danish radio and television from 1989 to 2020, indexed across the Danish media collections. From the data we could not only map airplay of specific songs year by year within minutes, but also analyze the contexts to a much higher degree than before. For instance, how a specific track was introduced or how the reception of a given song changes over time.

The tool has changed generally dark archives into vivid and rich resources for re-telling Danish media history. For now, the searches are performed track by track, but the perspectives of AI implementations are evident.


➺ Activating Histories of AV-Collections: From Enriched Metadata to Community Engagement
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Carolyn Birdsall (Short presentation)
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This presentation investigates the potential for better contextualising past histories of audiovisual (AV) collections in institutional metadata and explores possibilities for increased community engagement and knowledge co-creation. It will reflect on the process and results of the recent research project TRACE (Tracking Radio Archival Collections in Europe, 1930-1960) to consider further future pathways for integrating contextual information about the historical impact of war, conflict and political change (e.g. before and after World War II) on AV collections.
Drawing from the TRACE project framework that identified how AV archives have been subject to major disruptions and damage (e.g. to physical carriers/content, archival documentation, broadcast buildings/storage spaces, and continuities of staff/knowledge), this talk will take up several short examples to explore the extent to which historical insights can be gleaned from existing metadata.

This session consists of 2 presentations and a joint Q&A with the presenters. The session contains:

➺ Casey McNamara, Brianna Toth - Surfing the Ocean of Metadata with MediaConch to Meet the Needs of Many (Long presentation)

➺ Morgan Morel, Dave Rice, Charles Hosale - Updating Open Source AV Preservation Tools to Better Serve the Preservation Community (Short presentation)


**Abstracts:**


➺ Surfing the Ocean of Metadata with MediaConch to Meet the Needs of Many
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Casey McNamara, Brianna Toth (Long presentation)
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The Audio and Moving Image Preservation (AMIP) department of the New York Public Library and the Smithsonian’s Audiovisual Media Preservation Initiative (AVMPI) are both centralized preservation units that serve multiple curatorial branches of large, publicly funded research institutions. Both are undertaking mass digitization of heterogeneous collections of audiovisual materials for preservation and access, and both have a digitization output of thousands of files per year, using a combination of in-house labs and external vendor services. Quality Control procedures play an important role in both institutions' workflows, and, at this scale, automation of QC is essential. This presentation looks at how these two institutions make use of MediaArea's open source tool MediaConch to ensure specification conformance for their digital assets. In the case of NYPL AMIP, MediaConch has been part of the QC toolkit for several years, but new efforts are being made to refine its use with the aid of Python scripting. The case of AVMPI, as a relatively new initiative, MediaConch has been beneficial to develop quality control policies in tandem with (rather than in reaction to) digitization procedures. The presenters will share how they have collaborated with one another to develop their individual policies, touch on the learning curves they experienced using new digital tools, rigidity vs. permissiveness in standards, and their hopes and dreams for the future of QC.

➺ Updating Open Source AV Preservation Tools to Better Serve the Preservation Community
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Morgan Morel, Dave Rice, Charles Hosale (Short presentation)
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FADGI (Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative) has a longstanding partnership with developers within the audiovisual (AV) community, aimed at refining and advancing open-source tools essential for practitioners. In 2024, FADGI collaborated closely with developers Dave Rice and Jérôme Martinez to extend the functionality of key tools such as FFmpeg, vrecord, and BWF MetaEdit. This presentation offers an overview of the latest enhancements implemented in these applications, highlighting the underlying needs identified within both the US federal community and the broader AV preservation domain that drove their prioritization. Additionally, it delves into the collaborative processes employed, including the utilization of GitHub for project tracking and the crucial role of user testing conducted by community members and stakeholders.

Filling the gaps of the Spanish Colonial Filmic Archive. Restoring and activating Hermic Films’ propaganda documentaries in Equatorial Guinea
Abstract:
Although Spanish colonialism continued right up to the final third of the 20th century, the memory of this colonial legacy is practically non-existent, and only recently official bodies, such as the Ministry of Culture, have called for the decolonization of the national cultural heritage. Within the broader terrain of today’s cultural struggles and decolonial epistemologies, this talk focuses on the propaganda documentaries Hermic Films company made in Equatorial Guinea during Franco’s dictatorship. Considered one of the most important audiovisual sources of Spanish colonial history, it has been largely neglected and unknown. The partnership between Filmoteca Española and the research project “El documental institucional y el cine de aficionado coloniales: Análisis y usos” (Carlos III University of Madrid) has enable its (ongoing) fully digitization, academic study and public access. Taking this collaborative project as a case study, the talk will reflect on the process restoration and activation of the colonial filmic archive, which implies not only unveiling its ideology but also mobilizing it in participatory filmmaking aimed to develop counter-narratives and inscribe local agency

This session consists of 4 presentations and a joint Q&A with the presenters. The session contains:

➺ Johan Oomen, Rasa Bocyte - Insights from Practitioner Dialogues: Implementing AI Solutions Across Diverse Organisational Contexts (Short presentation)

➺ Isabel Schellnack-Kelly, Mashilo Modiba - Developing Smart Archives in Society 5.0: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence for Managing Audiovisual Archives in Africa (Long presentation)

➺ Alexander Wolff, Kim Voss - Is AI good enough? The struggles of automating a historical media archive. (Long presentation)

➺ Desiree Alexander, Chloe McLaren - AI for AV: Leveraging Artifical Intelligence for accessibility and discoverability of our audiovisual collections (Short presentation)


**Abstracts:**


➺ Insights from Practitioner Dialogues: Implementing AI Solutions Across Diverse Organisational Contexts
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Johan Oomen, Rasa Bocyte (Short presentation)
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This presentation explores research findings regarding the integration of AI solutions across various organisational contexts. The transformative potential of applying artificial intelligence in the context of audiovisual archiving has been demonstrated across a spectrum of use cases related to search & exploration, preservation, artistic expression and big-data analysis. Policy level interventions, such as the AI Act and the Ethical Guidelines for Trustworthy AI, also help to shape institutional strategies toward the responsible utilisation of AI technologies.
However, earlier research showed that integrating AI in the audiovisual domain still comes with a range of challenges. Key among these challenges are inquiries such as: (1) the strategic choice between off-the-shelf and bespoke solutions; (2) aligning the requirements of AI technologies with dimensions of existing (legacy) systems; (3) aligning public values & ethical considerations in procurement processes; (4) the scalability and-long term viability of solutions; (5) the imperative of fostering AI literacy to facilitate decision-making.
Given the specificity of the audiovisual domain (f.i. encompassing the time-based nature and scale of collections, adherence to specific standards, legacy data, and legacy systems) it is essential to develop and exchange good practices. With this in mind, the AI4Media Network of Excellence orchestrated dialogues with diverse practitioners from the media sector to capture their experiences. During this presentation, we will discuss these insights to provide the IASA community with practical guidance on sustainable and responsible integration of AI solutions into organisational workflows. Along with the formulation of organisational policies to guide the selection and utilisation of AI technologies.

➺ Developing Smart Archives in Society 5.0: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence for Managing Audiovisual Archives in Africa
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Isabel Schellnack-Kelly, Mashilo Modiba (Long presentation)
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In the age of Society 5.0, marked by the profound integration of digital technologies and human society, the preservation and management of audiovisual archives in Africa face substantial challenges. The exponential growth of digital content, combined with the continent's diverse cultural landscape, presents complex obstacles to conventional archival practices (Smith, 2020). Without the effective implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, crucial aspects such as curation, accessibility and sustainable management of audiovisual archives in Africa remain hindered. Thus, the overarching problem under scrutiny pertains to how the establishment of intelligent archives, facilitated by AI, can offer innovative solutions for preserving and managing audiovisual archives in Africa, within the overarching framework of Society 5.0. This approach has the potential to significantly contribute to safeguarding Africa's rich cultural heritage and advancing research, education and cultural exchange. The purpose of this paper will be to focus on the challenges encountered by selected African countries in managing their audiovisual collections and what can be done to facilitate AI. It was result in the formulation of a framework for implementing smart archives using AI in African contexts, emphasizing practical strategies and best practices.

➺ Is AI good enough? The struggles of automating a historical media archive.
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Alexander Wolff, Kim Voss (Long presentation)
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In 2022, the German Broadcasting Archive founded a specialized department for automation tasks to reach the goal of having all its collections documented until 2034. Since then, the team has developed strategies to help reach this ambitious goal with a lot of creativity, that led to successful projects and tools in the long run.
With large language models and other AI-driven tools, we lately discovered a whole new world of opportunities for our archive. Still, the special character of our heritage from the German Democratic Republic and the early times of German radio broadcasting is challenging when it comes to applying AI tools, that are trained on current data from the web. Also, together with our metadata experts we discuss if it is possible to reach the high-quality metadata standards for our databases with AI tools.
We tackle these challenges with various approaches and have become experts in tasks like prompt engineering and automatic transcription. Our tools increase the effectiveness in documentation and change the way information specialists work by supporting them with AI and non-AI-based data mining.
In our talk, we will present the struggles we overcame in applying AI and automation of historical media heritage and the tools we created and are still creating to automate the archive's daily work processes. We will also point out what this means for the work culture of a historical archive when old work routines are interrupted by new technologies.

➺ AI for AV: Leveraging Artifical Intelligence for accessibility and discoverability of our audiovisual collections
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Desiree Alexander, Chloe McLaren (Short presentation)
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Automated speech recognition (ASR) has evolved significantly in recent years, offering organizations stewarding AV materials unprecedented opportunities to leverage these tools to increase the accessibility and discoverability of their digital collections.
In this session, we will discuss our experience at Cornell University Libraries in evaluating and implementing ASR tools into our preservation workflows, with a specific focus on Whisper AI, an open source, command-line utility developed by OpenAI. We hope attendees will gain insight into the strengths and weaknesses of leveraging ASR tools, the challenges and opportunities presented by the technology, and practical guidance on how to develop or expand AV accessibility-related projects.

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

➺ Sanita Grina - It Happened Here: how the National Archives of Latvia help to uncover hidden history of Latvian towns and villages on national TV (Short presentation)

➺ Virginia Millington - Adapting at Scale and in Real Time - Evolving Ways of Creating an Audiovisual Record of the Contemporary Moment at StoryCorps (Long presentation)

➺ Laura Alhach Castro - (In)Visible Yuruparí: Exercises in Political, Collective, Material and Embodied Memory (Short presentation)


**Abstracts:**


➺ It Happened Here: how the National Archives of Latvia help to uncover hidden history of Latvian towns and villages on national TV
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Sanita Grina (Short presentation)
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Documentary series It Happened Here (Tas notika šeit) have been running on Latvian public television for five seasons. The premise is simple – in each episode, three historians arrive in a small town or village somewhere in Latvia. They have three days to uncover and research a story, with the help of the local inhabitants, about something connected to this place – for instance, the historical roots of a local legend, unknown facts about a famous person born in the place, or even make a surprising new discovery. At the end of the three days, the historians present their findings to the locals, who vote on the best story and bestow a title referring to it to a local landmark. In this presentation we would like to tell about how our partnership with the series producer, film studio Mistrus Media, has allowed to create one of the most watched documentary series on Latvian TV – entertaining, yet true to the principles of microhistory, making the local history visible on national scale, involving local historians, librarians, museum workers, storytellers, and, last but not least, boosting the pride of its inhabitants in their native place.

➺ Adapting at Scale and in Real Time - Evolving Ways of Creating an Audiovisual Record of the Contemporary Moment at StoryCorps
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Virginia Millington (Long presentation)
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StoryCorps began in 2003 with the opening of a recording booth in Grand Central Station. From the beginning, StoryCorps worked in collaboration with the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress to create an audio archive of the human experience, mediated through personal conversations. StoryCorps also experimented with new ways to record these personal interviews through the development of recording kits that could be shipped through the mail, a traveling Airstream trailer equipped with a sound booth, and stationary StoryBooths in a network of cities.

In 2019, StoryCorps made accessible to the public a collection of over 50,000 facilitated StoryCorps interviews, which included tools for participants to be able to access and share their own interviews. The lead up to this effort involved significant collaboration with the Library of Congress, and an outreach plan with the goal of informing over 99% of participants about this step. Although we had the rights to release these interviews to a broader public, how should we ethically and tactfully treat interviews that might require special consideration? Most importantly, how might we mitigate any concerns, internal and external, that might arise from taking such a major step?

This presentation will discuss, in practical terms, the stages of StoryCorps’ evolution, with a specific focus on StoryCorps’ changing technologies, our ongoing partnership with the Library of Congress, the formation of a specific ethical framework for display and access, and our plans for the future.


➺ (In)Visible Yuruparí: Exercises in Political, Collective, Material and Embodied Memory
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Laura Alhach Castro (Short presentation)
--
The state television series, ‘Yuruparí: Popular Traditional Art’, documented cultural expressions of peasant, Afro and indigenous populations in Colombia, leaving a memory of the sociopolitical configurations in the midst of the armed conflict of the 1980s. Being the most complete ethnographic record of its time, with rituals, festivals and songs declared Intangible Heritage of Humanity, the preservation of this collection after its censorship, invites us to reflect on access and restitution policies, in order to unveil untold stories and embedded narratives. Following the beginning of its restoration in 2013, led by independent researchers, filmmakers, public institutions and international organizations, 24 of the 86 chapters in 16mm have been completed.

The central figure of Gloria Triana, its main director, has led the conventional narrative around this archive. However, based on the documentation management and contextualization with a gender perspective of the private, state and community archives around this collection, more than 25 participating women who constitute part of Colombian audiovisual history have been made visible; Ann Marie Lóök, Beatriz Barros and María Ema Frade are just some of them.

In this way, in an exercise to recover the oral memory of the production team, the participation of the populations represented in the collective cataloging of their episodes, and the making of a film with the found materials, this project proposes different approaches to reread the sociopolitical narrative(s) imposed in the series and delve into the challenges of access, reuse and promotion of public archives in Colombia.

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

➺ Jaione Landaberea - The preservation of the Basque Country's Sound Heritage published online. An endeavour pursued by ERESBIL - Basque Music Archive over the last decade. (Long presentation)

➺ Marcello Ranieri, Angelo Pompilio - Connecting heterogeneous documents of performing arts from distinct collections. The case of opera (Short presentation)

➺ Gisa Jähnichen, Ahmad Faudzi Musib - Safeguarding the Sonic Heritage in Asian Communities: A Contextual Approach to Preservation (Long presentation)


**Abstracts:**


➺ The preservation of the Basque Country's Sound Heritage published online. An endeavour pursued by ERESBIL - Basque Music Archive over the last decade.
--
Jaione Landaberea (Long presentation)
--
The acquisition of our heritage sound collections is significantly conditioned by a multitude of factors, encompassing financial limitations, fluctuations in political environments, and, within the framework of a decentralized state like Spain, where the 17 Autonomous Communities possess full powers in cultural matters, by the modifications and implementation of legislation concerning bibliographic heritage and legal deposit at various levels.
Since the onset of the new millennium, the music industry has undergone a radical transformation in its market dynamics, profoundly affecting heritage centers entrusted with the preservation of sound collections. Presently, the predominant mode of music consumption is through streaming platforms.
This trend has resulted in a notable decline in the volume of publications in tangible format acquired through legal deposit. Concurrently, there is an enormous increase in the production and dissemination of digital music publications across various platforms. However, legislation concerning the legal deposit of online sound recordings remains unimplemented, thereby jeopardizing the preservation of these materials.
ERESBIL - Basque Music Archive is dedicated to collect, preserve, and disseminate the Basque Musical Heritage. Since 2000, it has served as conserving center for the legal deposit of tangible format sound recordings. Since 2015, concerned with the safeguarding of sound documents published online, Eresbil has been facing the challenge of searching, selecting, acquiring, cataloging, and preserving Basque sound recordings of cultural significance disseminated online, on its own initiative and outside the coverage of legal deposit. To this end, the archive has developed a series of strategies enabling the conservation of a substantial portion of Basque musical production across diverse genres, which would otherwise risk being lost.

➺ Connecting heterogeneous documents of performing arts from distinct collections. The case of opera
--
Marcello Ranieri, Angelo Pompilio (Short presentation)
--
Opera, as a performative art, is composed by many texts simultaneously. A literary text resides in the libretto, music is transcribed in music scores, and scenography or costumes are represented by sketches, among other elements. Collections bring together librettos, music scores, sketches and various other documents, including sound and audiovisual recordings, usually from different works. Normally, no information is provided regarding the section of the work to which a single item is related, or the available information is ambiguous. By way of example, according to cataloguing rules both the adagio and the cabaletta of Violetta’s aria in the first act are just part of Verdi’s “La Traviata” and simply cannot be distinguished from each other. An index would therefore be necessary to correctly reference a document to an identified position within a specific work.
Coherently with the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (and the Library Reference Model), we propose an index capable of mapping a document to the specific section of a work from which it originates. Furthermore, an authority file is created to precisely identify each extract of the work. This unifying approach facilitates the connection of distinct archives and collections across different institutions. The advantages for users are self-evident: the fragmented view is consolidated into a cohesive whole, ambiguity is eliminated, standardized search capabilities are enabled, and results can be enriched.
Examples from the collections of historical records housed within the Department of Cultural Heritage at the University of Bologna will be suggested.

➺ Safeguarding the Sonic Heritage in Asian Communities: A Contextual Approach to Preservation
--
Gisa Jähnichen, Ahmad Faudzi Musib (Long presentation)
--
Sound preservation goes beyond intentional sounds. While intentional sounds are often the primary focus during collection, contextual sounds play an equally vital role. These sounds, surrounding the intended sound, may remain passive and unfocused due to their soft amplitude. Nevertheless, their existence is undeniable, as the ear perceives sound spatially through depth and distance.
The conventional method of relying on single sound recordings for preserving sonic heritage imposes limitations, hindering the capture of diverse events. This constraint obstructs the creation of a comprehensive preservation material that vividly portrays specific locations of indigenous groups, especially their social and environmental aspects. The study concentrates on two distinct cultural communities: the Bidayuh community residing in a longhouse, and the Zhuang community in Napo County, Guangxi, China, where singing Zhuang songs at a specific park is integral to their daily social interactions. Additionally, literature on this phenomenon is analysed.
By employing contextual sound preservation methods, this joint paper aims to expand the scope of sonic heritage preservation to definite practices. It underscores a multi-dimensional approach, condensing the chosen locations' social and environmental dimensions. The collection process prioritizes social dynamics and daily life interactions; thus offering a deeper understanding of soundscapes and incorporating dynamic social activities within different proximities. Additionally, the research endeavours to document the changes and evolution within these soundscapes over time, considering the broader context and environmental factors. This contributes to a more holistic understanding of preserving audio elements associated with the use of audio archives, answering the first question.

This session consists of 5 posters. The session contains:

➺ Alberto Díaz Marcos, África González Alonso , Pablo Espiga Méndez, Marco Antonio Juan de Dios Cuartas - Ambisonic recording as a tool for "Historically Informed Performance": an approach to sound archiving outside commercial record production (Poster)
➺ Silvia Casagrande, Irati Cano Alkain, Pablo Maraví Martínez, Libe Belandia - Video Art. Planning a preservation strategy through synergies between institutions (Poster)
➺ Anita Afonu - Preserving Ghana's Cinematic Legacy: Advocacy, Archives, and the Storytellers (Poster)
➺ Chiu-yen Lin, Tzu-Miao Kuo - Conservation on Sound and Audiovisual Archives – an Example of Council Archives in Post-war Taiwan (Poster)
➺ Isabel Ferrer Senabre - Projecte SòNORE. Difusión del patrimonio musical valenciano con perspectiva de género (Poster)

Abstracts

➺ Ambisonic recording as a tool for "Historically Informed Performance": an approach to sound archiving outside commercial record production
--
Alberto Díaz Marcos, África González Alonso, Pablo Espiga Méndez, Marco Antonio Juan de Dios Cuartas
--
The subjective perception of our listening is influenced by factors like dynamics, frequency range, and timbre perception, associated with various recording technologies of the 20th century. Historically-Informed Performance (HIP) should reformulate Historically-Informed Recording (HIR) to document performances using technologies that provide comprehensive information about performance spaces, instruments, and performer positioning. Ambisonic recording is optimal for transferring sound heritage from a broader perspective. This research, part of the DEePMusic project, aims to use ambisonic recording to reconstruct performances in their original spaces, proposing alternatives to sound archives based solely on commercial recording aesthetics.

➺ Implementation of preservation metadata for digitization of videographic documents in public health from VideoSaúde(VSD)/Fiocruz
--
João Guilherme Machado, Eliane Batista Pontes, Cleomar Huche Lopes
--
Fiocruz, Brazil's largest public health research institution, is committed to public health policy innovation. Its Institute of Scientific and Technological Communication and Information in Health (ICICT) views audiovisual media as crucial for disseminating information and preserving public health memory. Through its Digital Preservation Program, Fiocruz develops strategies for preserving audiovisual collections, focusing on long-term access. VideoSaúde Distribuidora da Fiocruz is advancing a preservation ecosystem based on the OAIS model, applying PREMIS metadata to support the digitization and management of its audiovisual heritage.

➺ Video Art. Planning a preservation strategy through synergies between institutions.
--
Silvia Casagrande, Irati Cano Alkain, Pablo Maraví Martínez, Libe Belandia
--
Video art conservation faces a lack of responsibility in the cultural landscape, leading to vulnerability and potential loss. The "VideoFlux" project at the University of the Basque Country, in collaboration with Filmoteca Vasca, manages a collection of Basque video art, mainly u-matics. This project has structured a comprehensive preservation strategy, focusing on storage, handling, digitization, and accessibility. The experience, challenges, and solutions, including the use of open-source software for capturing and preserving digital material, will be shared.

➺ Preserving Ghana's Cinematic Legacy: Advocacy, Archives, and the Storytellers
--
Anita Afonu
--
This presentation explores a decade-long journey advocating for the repatriation and preservation of Ghana's cinematic heritage, starting with the 2012 documentary "Perished Diamonds." Despite challenges, the commitment to honoring post-independence Ghanaian filmmakers remains strong. Central to this advocacy is establishing an archive for Ghanaian cinema artefacts and narratives. Collaboration with Dr. Hodgkinson of the University of Oxford resulted in "The Storytellers," a film documenting contemporary Ghanaian filmmaking. At the 2024 IASA Conference, an interactive exhibition and a teaser of "The Storytellers" will be presented to spark dialogue and appreciation for Ghanaian cinema.

➺ Conservation on Sound and Audiovisual Archives – an Example of Council Archives in Post-war Taiwan
--
Chiu-yen Lin, Tzu-Miao Kuo
--
The National Archives Administration (NAA) of Taiwan, established in 2001, promotes the digitization of archival records, including sound and audiovisual archives. Taiwan's subtropical climate poses challenges for conservation. The Taiwan council’s sound and audiovisual archives from 1946 to 1998, listed in the “Memory of the World - National Registers of Taiwan” in 2018, serve as an example. Three NAA professionals completed an inventory and inspection of 9,458 audiovisual archives, conserving 32% of the damaged archives within two years. This process highlights Taiwan's democratic progress post-World War II and the Chinese Civil War.

➺ Projecte SòNORE. Difusión del patrimonio musical valenciano con perspectiva de género
--
Isabel Ferrer Senabre
--
SòNORE is a research project that gathers objects, people, and phenomena representing Valencian musical heritage with a gender perspective. It offers a comprehensive view of past musical practices of Valencian women and underrepresented groups. The platform provides free online access to documentary materials through a thematic catalog and narrative itineraries at www.projectesonore.com. SòNORE contextualizes and interprets patrimonial materials, including absent narratives and identities, challenging the androcentric canonical discourse. The project targets professionals, students, and the public, exemplifying current technological adaptation. The poster will describe the platform, focusing on knowledge transfer and dissemination possibilities.

Agenda:

1. T&E Committee’s Activities
2. Preservation Training Programme
   1. State of play
   2. Recurring topics
3. Recruiting new members & trainers
4. Miscellaneous

This session consists of 4 presentations and a joint Q&A with the presenters. The session contains:

➺ Rui Vilela - Rádio Libertação: anticolonial broadcastings and archival resonances (Long presentation)

➺ Veronica Boggio - Mapping the Amazon Archives: The Management of an Independent Collection in Peru. (Short presentation)

➺ Lee Watkins - Beyond the digital return: The production of digitized heritages at the International Library of African Music, Rhodes University, South Africa (Long presentation)


**Abstracts:**


➺ Rádio Libertação: anticolonial broadcastings and archival resonances
--
Rui Vilela (Long presentation)
--
Guerrilla broadcasting during the liberation movements contributed to the construction of ethereal geographies by uniting networks of people and broadcasting stations that amplified their voices. In Guinea-Bissau, the PAIGC quickly recognised the advantages of radio broadcasting in mobilising African populations and demoralising European troops. Rádio Libertação became an instrumental tool in the party’s arsenal, broadcasting from Guinea-Conakry from 1964 onwards, thus accentuating the sonic contours of the anticolonial insurgency against Portuguese colonial rule. Over the next decade, radio programmes covered a wide range of content, including updates on the military situation, political contestation, and psychological warfare. Such programmes juxtaposed unequivocal condemnation of colonial racism and crimes against humanity with narratives of national pride, state-building, and aspirations for peace and democracy. In recent years, I undertook the digitisation of reel-to-reel tapes from the sound archive of Rádio Libertação, and could access broadcastings and other recordings spanning the latter half of the Liberation Movement (1969-1974). The recordings reveal a political-ideological alignment across a spectrum of sonic events, ranging from news reports to musical productions, highlighting the construction of an anticolonial soundscape. The archival records unveil a lexicon indicating a progression of vocabulary from anticolonial critique towards decoloniality. Anticolonial sound archives function as repositories containing speeches, broadcasts, music, oral histories, and various audio recordings, offering documentation of the struggles, and resilience experienced by communities affected by colonialism and imperialism. By foregrounding the experiences and knowledge encapsulated by archival voices, the anticolonial sound archive emerges as a resource supplementing the colonial archive's omissions.

➺ Mapping the Amazon Archives: The Management of an Independent Collection in Peru.
--
Veronica Boggio (Short presentation)
--
A notable gap exists in institutions dedicated to the preservation and restoration of Peruvian cinematic heritage. This deficiency is emblematic of a broader trend within the Latin American landscape, where cultural policies lag behind in fostering the creation and upkeep of national film archives. The presentation will show the process of the project "The Lost Filmography", which is based on the implementation of different film preservation processes of two archives: that of the Biblioteca Amazonica (Iquitos) of the Agustinos Fathers and that of the Selvas Amazonicas (Madrid) of the Dominican fathers in the Amazon jungle of Peru. This is the starting point for the management of a collection dedicated to Amazonian cinema in coordination with the archive of the Filmoteca PUCP of Peru. The project has been propelled forward through independent management, in partnership with various stakeholders. This progress is made possible by strategic coordination between the Riva-Agüero Institute, the Filmoteca PUCP, the Elías Querejeta Zine Escola of the Basque Country, the Biblioteca Amazónica of Iquitos and Selvas Amazónicas from Madrid. The objective is to create a web page as a result that will aim to highlight these films and their history. Our overarching objective is to develop a dedicated website as the project's outcome, aimed at spotlighting these films and their historical significance. Consequently, it will be complemented by a series of promotional and educational initiatives designed to introduce audiences to the platform.

➺ Beyond the digital return: The production of digitized heritages at the International Library of African Music, Rhodes University, South Africa
--
Lee Watkins (Long presentation)
--
The International Library of African Music (ILAM) at Rhodes University in South Africa has been engaged in digital return projects since around 2014. With the assistance of my predecessor, Diane Thram, and students conducting research for their graduate degrees, the return of these recordings helped to transform the very nature of a music archive which had its origins during colonial times.


The return of these recordings helped to shape new relationships with communities who previously had little to no knowledge about these collections. But, the return of these recordings carried the risk of being sentimental rather than a generator of new knowledge. What happened to these recordings once they were returned? In this paper, I describe a “Beyond the digital return” project in Grahamstown, South Africa. Since 2023, ILAM has been involved with the Egazini Arts Centre in Joza township in a project which looks at what happens after the return of the recordings and at how the music archive can serve the interests of the surrounding community.


The recordings were made by Hugh Tracey in Grahamstown in the 1950s. This paper describes the processes of returning the recordings, and the thoughts and approaches coming from participants in the project. How does this very young generation of artists relate to the recorded sounds? How, in turn do they view the music archive which for much of its existence has not been available to them and the generations before them? I furthermore describe the goals, methods, and outcomes of this project to illustrate how the imagination and strategic planning can mitigate the effects of a colonial repository such as ILAM to tr

This session consists of 5 presentations and a joint Q&A with the presenters. The session contains:

➺ Tom Lorenz, Torsten Ahl - Playback speed identification for early shellac records (Long presentation)
➺ Karl Fleck - Let's Compromise: a Hybrid Approach to Compact Cassette Digitization (Short presentation)
➺ Jean-Hugues Chenot, Jean-Etienne Noiré - Bring Your Own Disc ! INA-Saphir analogue audio disc records optical recovery, update and tests (Long presentation)
➺ Rebecca Coronel - Deadline 2025 - All is not lost! (Short presentation)
➺ Julia Colleen Miller - Advancing PARADISEC's Archiving Workflow: Transitioning to Open-Source Solutions for Audio-visual Processing (Short presentation)

Abstracts:

➺ Playback Speed Identification for Early Shellac Records
--
Tom Lorenz, Torsten Ahl
--
This presentation addresses determining the correct playback speed of early shellac records. Digitising records from the early 1900s requires expertise in tuning, recording mechanisms, playback equipment, acoustic reproduction physics, and historical knowledge of pitch and musical performance. Choosing the right equalisation curve, playback speed, and needle is crucial for obtaining an authentic signal. While digital level corrections are possible, losses from incorrect signal extraction are irreversible.
QUADRIGA products ensure accurate digitisation and documentation. In collaboration with the Music Archive at the German National Library (DNB), a customised solution was developed to meticulously store all parameters in a database compliant with the AES Standard for audio metadata (AES57).
The presentation includes historical audio examples and will be jointly held by Torsten Ahl, audio engineer at the Music Archive of the German National Library, and the system manufacturer, who will explain the technical layout of the solution.

➺ Let's Compromise: a Hybrid Approach to Compact Cassette Digitization
--
Karl Fleck
--
Audio preservation operates at two extremes: fully-attended transfers and parallel transfers. Fully-attended transfers offer maximum quality assurance through real-time monitoring but can be impractical for large collections or limited budgets. Parallel transfers allow simultaneous digitization of multiple items but lack continuous monitoring and are risky for formats with multiple playback settings.
This presentation introduces a "hybrid" transfer workflow designed for compact cassettes, combining elements of both approaches. The method allows digitization of up to four cassettes simultaneously, with each playback machine aligned to a specific cassette. Transfers are continually monitored visually and spot-checked aurally, balancing the hands-on quality control of fully-attended transfers with the efficiency of moderate-throughput parallel transfers.
This hybrid approach aims to optimize the digitization process by maintaining high-quality standards while improving efficiency, particularly beneficial for projects with constraints on time or resources.

➺ Bring Your Own Disc ! INA-Saphir analogue audio disc records optical recovery, update and tests
--
Jean-Hugues Chenot, Jean-Etienne Noiré
--
Among the many analogue audio records, the most endangered are often those with few copies, such as direct recordings on lacquer discs. These may have unique audio tracks and present issues like cracks, de-laminations, stains, or even be broken, making conventional playback impractical.
The optical INA-Saphir process offers a way to recover audio from such records. After over 20 years of development within INA's research department, the process is now mature and available to the audio archive community. The first unit was delivered to the Czech National Museum in August 2023, used to recover historically valuable content.
The presentation will highlight recent system improvements and demonstrate audio extraction from seemingly irrecoverable discs, addressing limits in range, quality, and speed.
Attendees are invited to bring their damaged analogue audio records to test the INA-Saphir system during the conference. A full system will be on display, and we will attempt to scan and play every disc brought by participants: "BYOD2024: Bring Your Own Disc!"

➺ Deadline 2025 - All is not lost!
--
Rebecca Coronel
--
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) has led international efforts to prioritize magnetic media preservation. In our 2015 publication "Deadline 2025," we warned that ‘Tape not digitised by 2025 will likely be lost forever.’ As 2025 nears, NFSA reviews its achievements in magnetic media preservation amid limited resources, evolving cultural policy, and new funding exceeding $42 million for digitisation and digital infrastructure.
With more of NFSA’s magnetic media collection now digitised than not, and robust infrastructure supporting access and discovery, the urgency of Deadline 2025 has shifted. While challenges remain, they are less about media perishability. We continue to collect magnetic media, especially broadcast TV, and seek equipment and engineering solutions to complete our preservation goals.
This presentation will highlight NFSA’s successes in digitising and preserving magnetic media, ongoing efforts to manage obsolete playback equipment, and future plans post-2025.

➺ Advancing PARADISEC's Archiving Workflow: Transitioning to Open-Source Solutions for Audio-visual Processing
--
Julia Colleen Miller
--
PARADISEC is a digital repository for records from diverse small cultures and languages worldwide. Our focus is on community access and adherence to international digital archiving standards. PARADISEC developed a framework for accessioning, cataloguing, and digitizing audio, text, and visual material, prioritizing at-risk content preservation.
We're transitioning to a cloud-based infrastructure using Amazon S3 for storage, enhancing efficiency and scalability. We're also shifting from JPEG 2000 MXF Op1a to FFV1/MKV for archival video, aligning with global sustainable archiving trends. Our workflows are evolving to incorporate open-source tools like MediaInfo and FFmpeg.
We'll expand our online documentation with new technical workflows, demonstrating our commitment to transparency, maintaining institutional knowledge, and providing resources for digital preservation. These resources can guide other archives and empower smaller communities to preserve their cultural materials, ensuring accessibility and longevity of cultural and linguistic resources for future generations.

This session consists of 5 presentations and a joint Q&A with the presenters. The session contains:

➺ Pol Cruells, Francesc Xavier Sánchez - Radio Barcelona, 100 years of radio history : past, present and future partnerships (Long presentation)

➺ Ferenc János Szabó - Audiovisual collections in Hungary – Where do we stand now? (Long presentation)

➺ Sony Prosper - Archival Repatriation and Return: Current Trends and Directions (Short presentation)

➺ Nthabiseng Ncala - The Effects Of Preservation Management On Risks In The Archival Institutions Of Esarbica (Short presentation)

➺ Javier Suarez Pajares - The project "Music in the grooves" and non-commercial records (Long presentation)


**Abstracts:**


➺ Radio Barcelona, 100 years of radio history : past, present and future partnerships
--
Pol Cruells, Francesc Xavier Sánchez (Long presentation)
--
On November 14, 1924, Radio Barcelona was officially inaugurated. In June of that same year, the government approved the regulations that were to govern radio broadcasting and the ANR obtained the first official licence: EAJ-1.
On the occasion of its 70th anniversary, in 1994 Radio Barcelona ceded to the Generalitat de Catalunya the management for public access the Archimag, a collection of 10.000 magnetic tapes, and its historical record library, consisting of some 10,000 78 rpm records and 100.000 vinyls. The Department of Culture of the Catalan government placed the archive in the Biblioteca de Catalunya, where it has been publicly accessible ever since, also preserving the sound in the library’s digital preservation system, CoFRE
The commemorative events of Radio Barcelona’s centennary began coinciding with World Radio Day, on February 13, with the inauguration of a website in Catalan and Spanish, where these 100 years of history are reviewed and where historical moments and radio milestones are compiled.
Radio Barcelona and the Escola Superior d'Arxivers i Gestors de Documents (ESAGED) of the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, will undertake the digitization and cataloguing of a large part of the photographic and documentary collection kept in the radio station's archive. In addition, and also in collaboration with the UAB, an International Radio Congress will be held on October 15 and 16, where the current situation of the medium will be analysed and its future will be discussed.


➺ Audiovisual collections in Hungary – Where do we stand now?
--
Ferenc János Szabó (Long presentation)
--
Although there have been several surveys of Hungarian sound archives in the twentieth century, the last one was carried out in 1991, on the occasion of the IASA congress in Sopron (see the relevant publications in IASA Phonographic Bulletin). Since the early 1990s, audiovisual culture has changed dramatically. It is not only the collections that are changing, but also the problems that institutions face. In my presentation I intend to give a current overview of the Hungarian collections focusing on audio documents.
One part of the overall picture is rather pessimistic. Several attempts have been made to create a national sound archive in Hungary in the 20th and 21st centuries, but they all failed. Some of the most important audiovisual collections in Hungary are privately owned and accessible neither for the public and nor for research. Audiovisual collections in public, university, research and other libraries face different problems (decreasing number of users, financial difficulties, legal problems, frequently changing types of media, etc.).
On the other hand, the sound collection of the National Széchényi Library has grown enormously in recent decades. Thanks to a few purchases and generous donations from private record collectors, the library has been enriched with a huge collection of archival audio documents. This partly replaces (as far as possible) the losses of the national library caused by the historical events of the twentieth century in Hungary. Furthermore, the preservation of non-commercial audiovisual documents related to local history in provincial libraries has increased in importance in recent decades.

➺ Archival Repatriation and Return: Current Trends and Directions
--
Sony Prosper (Short presentation)
--
This presentation keeps track of ongoing dissertation work around the repatriation and return of archival material. Drawing from the literature on repatriation from archival studies, museum studies, museum anthropology, performance studies, sound studies, and ethnomusicology, I argue that a full understanding of archival repatriation is incomplete without examining the role diasporic communities play as actors in such efforts. While the sources in the areas I draw from have largely kept track of activities at the national and international planes, more of the literature needs to do the same for diasporic communities who might also have a stake in repatriation and return. In this presentation, I explore the several approaches to archival repatriation emerging from the literature and end by presenting preliminary data from an ongoing research study examining how the Radio Haiti Archive at Duke University should be repatriated and returned to Haiti and the role the Haitian diaspora plays.

The dissertation research study examines how various groups view the repatriation of the Radio Haiti Archives by asking: how should the archive at Duke University be returned and repatriated to Haiti? What role does the Haitian diaspora play? What are the barriers and obstacles to repatriating and returning the archive? In order to answer these questions, I use an ethnographic approach that brings together an analysis of documents and archival records, unstructured interviews, semi-structured interviews, and informal observations. This research will particularly focus on the role diasporic communities play in repatriation efforts, suggesting that a full understanding of archival repatriation is incomplete without examining the role diasporic communities play in such efforts.

➺ The Effects Of Preservation Management On Risks In The Archival Institutions Of Esarbica
--
Nthabiseng Ncala (Short presentation)
--
Preservation management is the one of the ways to maintain existing and future audio-visual records in which archival institutions have invested resources. However the archival institutions of the Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Branch of The International Council on Archives (ESARBICA) are fraught with various risks that threaten all audio-visual records collections. Without effective preservation management capable of controlling, minimising, treating, and predicting risks, AVR heritage of the region will be lost forever. The aim of the study was to address the problem at hand by designing a conceptual framework based on the relationship between preservation management factors and risks. This study applied a cross-sectional survey quantitative research approach where data collected was analysed using various descriptive and inferential statistical tools. The study found that there is a negative correlation between risks and preservation management that played a key role to predict risk variables, and to assess how changes in preservation management influenced risks. Theoretically, the study expanded the current knowledge on the effectiveness of preservation strategies and some were facilitated by the application of artificial intelligence. Practical contributions showcases the relationship between preservation management and risks, an empirical model that fit well elements that need to be considered when assessing preservation management of audio-visual records was developed to enable stakeholders to assess the effectiveness of preservation management to contribute to the understanding under which circumstances of preservation management influence and control risks. Archival institutions will be able to put policies in place to improve their overall performance in safeguarding audio-visual heritage for access to, and future use.

➺ The projec

IASA Broadcast Archives Section - Open Meeting
AGENDA

• Opening (10 min): Greetings and introductions, including recognition of first-time IASA attendees
• Approval of minutes of the BAS Open Meeting, 2023 (5 min)
• Lightning Round (25 min)
  • Marcos Sueiro Bal - Update on archival activities from WYNC
  • ...
• New business, questions, or general comments from meeting participants (10 min)

IASA 55th Annual Conference
23 September 2024, 16:30 CEST
Valencia, Spain & Online via Zoom

General Assembly Agenda
Chair: Patrick Midtlyng, IASA President
Venue: La Nau Cultural Center of the University of Valencia and Zoom

Tuesday, 24 September 2024, 16:30-18:00 CEST

Topic 1    Greetings from other organizations and apologies
Topic 2    Approval of the agenda
Topic 3    Approval of the minutes of the General Assembly 2023
Topic 4    The IASA President’s address (Patrick Midtlyng)
Topic 5    Secretary-General’s report (Pedro Félix) 
Topic 6    Treasurer’s report (Nadia Lai)
Topic 7    Vice President of Membership report (Bronwyn Officer)
Topic 8    Vice President of Conferences report (Rosalinda Rowe) 
Topic 9    Vice President of Communications report (Andrew Martin)
Topic 10    Editor’s report (Jennifer Vaughn) 
Topic 11    Web Manager’s report (Bright Joshua)
Topic 12    CCAAA and UNESCO reports (Tre Berney and Pio Pellizzari)
Topic 13    IASA Awards 2024
Topic 14    Any other business
Topic 15    Q&A: Question from the audience & online attendees (if you attend online, please submit questions to any of the board members during the GA in the Q&A box)

Unió Musical Centre Històric
Vicente Gabarda Porras, director
They will perform famous pieces from the wind band tradition in Valencia.
There will also be refreshments and cocktails, along with nibbles after the concert.

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

➺ Tre Berney - Infrastructure needs in 21st century audiovisual archives (Short presentation)

➺ Shruti Nagpal - Datafication, Surveillance and New Media Archive in Academia: A Study based in New Delhi, India (Long presentation)

**Abstracts:**


➺ Infrastructure needs in 21st century audiovisual archives
--
Tre Berney (Short presentation)
--
Over 90% of the data that exists today was created within the last decade. Audiovisual archives maintain that same challenges they have always had, yet archives aren’t prepared for the onslaught of content being produced. It is increasingly how we communicate and consume information. In order to inhabit this digital world, we must reframe how we think of audiovisual content. It is created, managed, preserved, and made accessible in the context of a data-driven world. This talk will focus on core components of infrastructure that are required to continue our work on capturing and maintaining our shared record in a multi-disciplinary world. It will also raise questions around perception of audiovisual materials in the field of research data management. There is a coming convergence in best practices from archives to research data management that should be explored.

➺ Datafication, Surveillance and New Media Archive in Academia: A Study based in New Delhi, India
--
Shruti Nagpal (Long presentation)
--
The proposed paper explores the New Media technology in urban classrooms and the advancement in surveillance archives in academic infrastructures. While discussing the nature, context and application of surveillance devices, the study explores CCTV cameras, biometric and face recognition sensors and id-card tapping devices for monitoring attendance and regularity. The paper questions the archives created out of the codified digital existence of teachers, students, subjects in academia and the archiving of such data and the audio-visual material recorded in CCTV cameras for automated data management processes. Exploring the technological integration with academic culture, the study documents the changes in the dynamics of interaction in educational campuses and use of Educational ERP software for recording attendance, scores, monitoring and tracking of the archival database. The paper questions the privacy, transparency, and integrity of communication using such surveillance capitalist devices. Stemming from the theoretical interventions of Donna Haraway (1991), the research tries to understand if there is a link in the rapid privatization of education, datafication and frenzy technical acceleration in academia. While studying the Surveillance culture in private corporate regimes in academia, the paper looks at the nature and usage of such private archives.

This session consists of 4 presentations and a joint Q&A with the presenters. The session contains:

➺ Viktor Johansson - The Karl Tirén Joik Collection – Experiences and lessons learned nominating Sami cultural heritage to the UNESCO Memory of the World programme (Short presentation)
➺ Nathan Gibson - Community Engagement Through Archives-Based Artist Residencies (Long presentation)
➺ Dzidzor Azaglo , Crystal Bi Wegner - Collective Imagination throughout Time: How imagination has shaped the physical landscape of our communities in Boston (Long presentation)


**Abstracts:**

➺ The Karl Tirén Joik Collection – Experiences and lessons learned nominating Sami cultural heritage to the UNESCO Memory of the World programme
--
Viktor Johansson (Short presentation)
--
Between 1913-1915, the Swedish folk music collector Karl Tirén recorded about 300 phonograph cylinders containing Sami joik. In 2023, the Karl Tirén Joik Collection was nominated to the UNESCO Memory of the World programme, which aims to protect and preserve archives with culturally valuable documents. The application to UNESCO was initiated by Svenskt visarkiv, a governmental archive who is the current owner of the collection. The phonograph recordings made by Karl Tirén is one of the oldest sound collections in Sweden. The recordings were made in a time when the Sami culture was oppressed by the Swedish society. Today, the collection is a unique documentation of one of the world's recognized indigenous peoples (as well as one of five national minorities in Sweden) and the collection has great significance for the survival and development of the Sami joik. The Karl Tirén collection also tells us stories about changing roles of the archives: From being a part of the construction of the modern national state – where the cultural expressions of minorities often have been neglected – the archives of today aspires to be public sources available to all people. The focus of this presentation is the Karl Tirén collection. But foremost, it discusses experiences from working with the UNESCO nomination. The process has provided important experiences and lessons learned about the work of a governmental archive in relation to the rights of national minorities to decide for themselves about the use of their cultural heritage.

➺ Community Engagement Through Archives-Based Artist Residencies
--
Nathan Gibson (Long presentation)
--
In 2022, traditional fiddler Beth Hoven Rotto spent the spring semester as UW-Madison’s Musician-In-Residence, exclusively working with the Arnold Munkel Collection in Mills Music Library. Rotto’s knowledge and mastery of Upper Midwestern fiddle traditions and its many community members vastly enhanced the archival collection guides and her residency provided undergraduates with firsthand access to Upper Midwestern fiddle and dance traditions. Transcribing more than 80 tunes from the Munkel collection, Rotto then formed a community ensemble and taught both community and campus members selections from the varied and oft-forgotten Scandinavian-American old-time tunes held in the Mills Music Library's Wisconsin Music Archives. This presentation highlights the resident-musician, institutional, and communal benefits unlocked when archives incorporate folk musicians and traditional artists into residency programs.

➺ Collective Imagination throughout Time: How imagination has shaped the physical landscape of our communities in Boston
--
Dzidzor Azaglo , Crystal Bi Wegner (Long presentation)
--
Department of Public Imagination - a public art and archival project - examines archives of collective, horizontal imagination work by communities of color in Boston. Often our communities are reshaped by top-down design in ways that don’t take into account the needs of residents of color. Horizontal imagination work, by contrast, is a result of communities designing and imagining what they need based on deep local knowledge. Through Dzidzor Azaglo and Crystal Bi’s work, they highlight archives which preserve collective imagination through history; drawing a map throughout Boston to hard-won community spaces such as Villa Victoria, Mary Hannon Park, or Chinatown Library. These spaces demonstrate how collective imagination work has altered the physical landscape of our city with more equitable and vibrant public spaces and community infrastructure. Through this public art project, Dzidzor and Crystal also engage folks in Boston to add to a living archive through an installation of a Dream Portal for Imagination Collection and live soundscape events which encourage collaborative envisioning.

This session consists of 4 presentations and a joint Q&A with the presenters. The session contains:

➺ Léa Morin, Deva Pereda, Mariana Torres, Paul Bonnarme, Laura Alhach Castro - CinémArabe, Asia, Africa, Latin America (1975-1979): Material Research and Circulation Approach for the Preservation of “C3 Non-Aligned Film Archives” (Short presentation)

➺ Juan Antonio Casado - From echoes to ecosystems: Transforming sound recordings into knowledge through Artificial Intelligence (Long presentation)

➺ L'Armari de la Memòria, Pablo Hernández Miñano, Bruno Laurent, Inés Ferrando Vidal - La Pinteta Rebel: Queer waves for historical memory. A case of radio archiving in an LGTBQ+ archive (Short presentation)

➺ Filippo Mengoni - Like Never Before: Leveraging AI to Promote Access to the Original Oral Sources of the Cineteca di Bologna (Short presentation)


**Abstracts:**


➺ CinémArabe, Asia, Africa, Latin America (1975-1979): Material Research and Circulation Approach for the Preservation of “C3 Non-Aligned Film Archives”
--
Léa Morin, Deva Pereda, Mariana Torres, Paul Bonnarme, Laura Alhach Castro (Short presentation)
--
In the search for the traces, stories and archives of the Third Cinema Movement, we evidenced a disconcerting lack of resources in official archives. Nonetheless, in face of this unexplored theme, an abundance of documentation, publications and even films, almost totally unpreserved, appeared in private and transnational archives. An immense material memory in danger of disappearing.

CinémArabe magazine is one of these almost unknown traces of the existence of a Transnational Third Film Critic Movement. Dedicated mainly to Arab cinema, also to Asian, African and Latin American, CinémArabe was created in Paris in 1975 by a group of young critics and filmmakers, fighting for the existence of a film critic committed to the cinema of their countries.

From 1975 to 1979, it proposed unpublished interviews with African filmmakers, covered tricontinental festivals, and was also the space for the publication of manifestos translated into French and Arabic.

With new interviews conducted with the magazine contributors such as Magda Wassef, Ali Akika, Abdoul War, Ahmed El Maanouni and Khemais Kheyati, and engaged in a collective work methodology for studying close-ups and multiple micro-stories published in the magazine, we tried to understand the context of the existence and disappearing of the magazine, how was it circulating, and what can film criticism do in a context of political and aesthetic domination? This, with the aim of giving new light to non-central narratives of militant gestures and film critics from the 70s and pondering on the echoes in present day political and aesthetical proposals.

➺ From echoes to ecosystems: Transforming sound recordings into knowledge through Artificial Intelligence
--
Juan Antonio Casado (Long presentation)
--
The project, submitted to the National Library of Spain, is an initiative to contextualize the wealth of information compiled in more than 200 Subterfuge Radio podcasts titled "Sympathy for the Music Industry". These podcasts feature interviews with key figures from the Spanish music industry scene, aiming to share their insights, experiences, and outlooks on the recording industry.

Interviewees dissect their roles within this professional landscape, essentially crafting a comprehensive encyclopedia filled with diverse data, including previously undisclosed information. This proves valuable beyond the confines of the interview format. The collection encompasses individuals, events, dates, companies, and statistics, accumulated over more than 200 interviews, each lasting around an hour, that the program has released so far.

This project originates from these audio sources. After converting them into text and employing graph theory alongside ontological analysis principles, it compiles all discussed data into a semantic model. Once processed and interconnected, the narrative's components become navigable on a web platform through interactive visualizations. These visualizations span chronological, geographical, documentary aspects, and the relationships among the elements discussed.

Artificial intelligence plays a crucial role in the project's two primary phases: the conversion of speech to text, utilizing Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, and the recognition and classification of entities.

➺ La Pinteta Rebel: Queer waves for historical memory. A case of radio archiving in an LGTBQ+ archive
--
L'Armari de la Memòria, Pablo Hernández Miñano, Bruno Laurent, Inés Ferrando Vidal (Short presentation)
--
Among the most interesting audiovisual and sound archive documents currently kept in l’Armari de la Memòria, there is a set of audios from the radio program La Pinteta Rebel, broadcast on Radio Klara (Valencia, 1982-present) between 1984 and 1994. La Pinteta Rebel was a pioneer radio program in Spain for its content: it included news, interviews and fiction dedicated to the LGTBIQ+ community, so invisibilized and repressed in the 80s. The protagonist voices, were the activist Miquel Alamar and the members of the music-hall group Ploma-2, Rampova and Clara Bowie.
In addition to being a space for transgression, discussion and critical look at the current political and social norms in the last years of the Spanish Transición and entry into democracy, La Pinteta Rebel appears in a year when the gay liberation movement had been dismantled in the city of Valencia, assuming an important role in the struggle and the claim for the rights of LGTBIQ+ people.
In this presentation, the professional team of l’Armari de la Memòria will explain the process of recovery of these sound archives and their treatment as a documentary source to reconstruct a collective memory. It will address the problems that have arisen in this process and what challenges remain to be faced in the reconstruction and dissemination of these documents for their historical use and promotion.


➺ Like Never Before: Leveraging AI to Promote Access to the Original Oral Sources of the Cineteca di Bologna
--
Filippo Mengoni (Short presentation)
--
Despite being one of the earliest methods of historiography, oral sources have continuously struggled to assert their value. Thanks to technological and informatic advancements, we initially moved to recording sound on physical media and subsequently dematerialized it into a vast series of bits. These progressions have allowed us not to settle for transcriptions and to use timed indexes that assist users in searching for information, overcoming one of the major inconveniences that has hindered the widespread dissemination of these sources outside this research area.
Despite these significant changes, interviews still struggle to find its place in historiographical research and in archival management as sources able to reproduce the sonic nature of spoken language, rather than written text. The reason is due to the considerable amount of resources needed to create timed indexes for a multitude of available sources.
Through the use of Automatic Speech Recognition and Automated Indexing systems, AI software will be utilized as a means to promote access to more than fifteen hundred oral sources primarily involving well-known figures and unpublished recordings at the Cineteca di Bologna. For these reasons, the project represents a unique challenge and atypical features: both for an archive specialized in preserving film heritage and for oral history in general.
After physical media and digital formats, we are facing another important, perhaps decisive, step: assessing the implications of using AI to finally allow the voices confined in our archives to emerge and be heard by all.

This committee session is a hybrid session. All are welcome to join either in-person or online.

During this session, we will reflect on the past year and make plans for the future. All ideas and suggestions are welcome. The IASA DEI Committee serves as a vital platform for individuals to play an active role in advancing the ongoing efforts related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) within IASA. By providing a supportive space for the exchange of ideas and insights, we aim to secure the organization's dedication to fostering diversity, ensuring equity, and promoting inclusivity. If you are interested in joining the committee, please fill out the form.

For more information about the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee, see: https://iasa-web.org/diversity-equity-inclusion-committee.

DEI Committee Officers: Miyuki Meyer, Randi Cecchine

This session consists of 4 presentations and a joint Q&A with the presenters. The session contains:

➺ Christian Poske, Anna Ziya Geerling - Mapping Indigenous Ecological Knowledge and Stories of Belonging in the Eastern Himalayan Region: Community Archiving in Times of the Climate Crisis (Long presentation)

➺ David Walker, Cecilia Peterson - Building Collaborative Indigenous Audiovisual Documentation: A Case Study from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival (Long presentation)

➺ Cristina Sá Valentim - What untold narratives can colonial sound archives reveal? Music, Power, and Resistance in Angola. (Short presentation)

➺ Nadjah Rios villarini, Victor Torres Rodríguez, Tania Ríos Marreo - Participatory Digital Archiving Builds Communities: Lessons from Puerto Rico and the Caribbean (Panel session)


**Abstracts:**

➺ Mapping Indigenous Ecological Knowledge and Stories of Belonging in the Eastern Himalayan Region: Community Archiving in Times of the Climate Crisis
--
Christian Poske, Anna Ziya Geerling (Long presentation)
--
Unprecedented rapid transformations in the earth’s critical climate regions alarm us all and call for equally unprecedented transformations in educational policies, priorities, and approaches at audiovisual archives located in these regions to critically engage and amplify the voices of local and indigenous communities disproportionately impacted by climate change. As a member institution of the international environmental humanities research and education project ‘Ekologos’ (2022–2026), the Highland Institute in Kohima engages pedagogically with the climate changes affecting the eastern Himalayan region. As part of these efforts, the Institute supports local communities in documenting and safeguarding their traditional ecological knowledges and place-based oral literatures through collaborative research and community archiving initiatives to revitalize and promote awareness about these traditions with an ‘Atlas of Ecological Knowledge’. The resulting recordings will be accessible at the Institute’s audiovisual archive and online via a digital mapping platform, allowing locals, and especially youth, to engage with the ancestral relations to their lands through songs, stories, and myths conveying intimate land relationships and traditional ecological knowledge relevant to maintaining and restoring climate change resilience. An essential component of this investigation into digitizing traditional knowledge is considering intellectual property rights, ethics, and potential hazards such as biopiracy, which the Institute addresses by consulting local communities, IP rights experts, and IT specialists to explore suitable software solutions. In this presentation, we discuss the initiatives the Highland Institute has taken in this field, the challenges encountered, and the planned steps ahead, drawing on insights gained as co-coordinators of the Ekologos project.

➺ Building Collaborative Indigenous Audiovisual Documentation: A Case Study from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival
--
David Walker, Cecilia Peterson (Long presentation)
--
In 2024, the Smithsonian Institution will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) with a six-day Festival on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The high-resolution audiovisual documentation created during the event will be archived at the Smithsonian, forming a substantial body of ethnographic research material. However, properly creating and stewarding this documentation requires a commitment to cultural respect, acknowledgment of shared ownership of the material, and active collaboration with the traditional bearers represented.

In this presentation, archivists from the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (CFCH) will provide an overview of workflows for creating born-digital documentation and discuss strategies for responsible and ethical stewardship of the material. Specifically, they will describe the need for proactive work with participants to create transparency around the documentation process. Questions to be addressed include: How will the assets be managed? Who may access them, and how will they be used? How does CFCH’s Shared Stewardship Policy apply to this newly created material? In this case study, the archivists will also describe the collaboration process with the NMAI, a leader in the ethical and reparative description of Indigenous materials. They will explore how the resources created by the museum, such as the NMAI Culture Thesaurus, are used to ensure accurate descriptive metadata and how rights and permissions are tracked. By sharing our experiences, we hope this case study can serve as a model for future community-based documentation initiatives, particularly for Indigenous and traditional knowledge.

➺ What untold narratives can colonial sound archives reveal? Music, Power, and Resistance in Angola.
--
Cristina Sá Valentim (Short presentation)
--
Colonial archives are part of what Valentin Mudimbe called the colonial library. This means that the colonial archives are a set of knowledge that legitimized hierarchical identities of the colonized and the colonizer, which produced subalternity and unequal relations of power. Furthermore, colonial sound archives – mostly neglected in favor of written, visual, and audiovisual historical sources – combine performative, ontological, acoustic, and political dimensions that need to be considered to better understand the complexities of power relations. What colonial sound archives hide, omit and display? What untold narratives can traditional music reveal about colonial power and resistance?
This paper discusses some traditional Cokwe songs related to the colonial mining forced labor at Lunda region. These songs were collected during the Portuguese colonial rule in the 1950s in Angola by the Museu do Dundo of the former diamond mining company – Companhia de Diamantes de Angola (Diamang). Based on ongoing interdisciplinary research between anthropology, history and post-colonial studies, this presentation is built on a collaborative approach that combines colonial archival research and historical-ethnographic fieldwork on memories and shared listening of these songs, in Angola and Portugal. This case study aims to uncover the multiple African voices and practices of agency and resistance, also showing how Portuguese colonial domination was intertwined with Angolan music and culture. Above all, this presentation aims to contribute to the decolonization of African colonial sound collections that remain unstudied and largely unknown, and share some reflections on the challenges related to research into colonial sound archives.


➺ Participatory Digital Archiving Builds Communities: Lessons from Puerto Rico and the Caribbean
--
Nadjah Rios villarini, Victor Torres Rodríguez, Tania Ríos Marreo (Panel session)
--
This panel explores production and post-production processes as part of the methodology for participatory community archives. From transdisciplinary perspectives, the panelists address fundamental questions such as: who are community archives for and what function do they serve? Based on concrete experiences in Puerto Rico, the presenters describe specific instances of co-creation of archival resources, involving researchers from the University of Puerto Rico affiliated with the UPR Caribbean Digital project, the Digital Library of the Caribbean, and two grassroots community groups spearheading important sociocultural projects on the island: Casa Pueblo and Taller Comunidad La Goyco. The stories of these communities recorded in audiovisual documentation not only reveal the successes and challenges of their struggles but also demonstrate the ability to propose solutions to problems such as gentrification, the use of renewable energy, and the promotion of cultural actions as a cohesive element for the political organization of the members comprising these groups.

This session consists of 2 presentations and a joint Q&A with the presenters. The session contains:

➺ Johanna Huehn - “But whether the voice of the heart can be heard is questionable”. Sound recordings of prisoners at the 1926 Berlin Police Exhibition (Long presentation)

➺ Ninna Carneiro, Gabriel Cardoso - Organizing the unorganized: the challenge of structuring a digital audiovisual archive (Short presentation)


**Abstracts:**


➺ “But whether the voice of the heart can be heard is questionable”. Sound recordings of prisoners at the 1926 Berlin Police Exhibition
--
Johanna Huehn (Long presentation)
--
This contribution discusses how sound recordings of prisoners were presented as potential forensic evidence in the context of the 1926 Berlin Police Exhibition. It traces the collaboration between the Berlin Lautarchiv (sound archive), Prussian police, and local prison administration, and contextualizes the bid to promote sound recording and reproduction technology as a promising tool for police investigation. It argues that the recordings framed as “voice portraits of criminals” were an attempt to establish voice recordings not only as biometric identifiers to be cataloged in police databases but also as evidence of a person’s character and inclinations. It ties the claim to 1) the evidential characteristics of the voice to the idea of “anthropophonetics”, proposed by the then director of the Lautarchiv as a science in its own right based on phonetic examination, and 2) relates the recording project to a broader shift to prioritize “the criminal’s character” rather than “the character of the crime” – as discernible in the reforms of the Prussian penitentiary system, the increasing institutionalization of “criminal biology” and specifically, the intensifying discourse around so-called “habitual criminals”. It emphasizes how the interests of the involved institutions have shaped the structure and texture of the archive and attempts to counter these embedded and imposed narratives by a close(r) listening/reading of the recorded testimonies and manuscripts, emphasizing moments of interrogation and contestation on record and paper. Drawing on archival theory and sound studies, I critically reflect on my own attempt and desire to “unveil narratives” when engaging in academic/archival work.

➺ Organizing the unorganized: the challenge of structuring a digital audiovisual archive
--
Ninna Carneiro, Gabriel Cardoso (Short presentation)
--
The Nucleus of Audiovisual and Documentary (NAD) is a part of the Center for Research and Documentation on Contemporary Brazilian History of Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV CPDOC), and it was created in 2006 as a space to think of new ways in which to use CPDOC’s historical archive. These documents, that include manuscripts, letters, photographs, moving images and oral history interviews, among others, are important sources in terms of research of Brazil’s contemporary political history, ever since CPDOC was founded in 1973. When NAD was created, its original purpose was to reuse these documents, creating documentaries, short videos, edited interviews, among other productions. The intent was to expand access to CPDOC’s archive, but over the years NAD began to create its own audiovisual documents, a vast array of digital audiovisual archives that were not organized in any type of database. Our current project is to organize all these documents, making a digital curation effort to select which documents should be preserved, how to best organize them so other can access them in the future, and how to make a long-term digital preservation plan of these documents that is adequate to CPDOC’s infrastructure.

This session consists of 4 presentations and a joint Q&A with the presenters. The session contains:

➺ Ketevani Davitashvili, Laura Alhach - Advancements in Archival Practices: Insight into the FRAME Advanced Access 2023 (Short presentation)

➺ Julia Colleen Miller, Nick Ward - PARADISEC creates tertiary-level curricula, focusing on discipline-specific archiving practices in Linguistics, Anthropology, and Ethnomusicology (Long presentation)

➺ Jean-Baptiste Masson - A manual for the restoration of the sound of amateur films (Short presentation)

➺ Kimberly Tarr - Praxis and Partnership: How Archival Training Programs Support the Audiovisual Archiving Field (Short presentation)


**Abstracts:**


➺ Advancements in Archival Practices: Insight into the FRAME Advanced Access 2023
--
Ketevani Davitashvili, Laura Alhach (Short presentation)
--
The FRAME Advanced 2023 training provided an exceptional immersion into the practices of esteemed institutions like INA, Cinémathèque, and BNF. The training showcased presentations and discussions revolving around digitization initiatives and archival strategies. INA's pioneering efforts in video-on-demand services and inventive utilization of social media platforms exemplified a forward-looking approach to enhancing archive accessibility. Moreover, a guided tour of the National Library highlighted the transformative potential of AI in archival processes.
Looking ahead to the forthcoming IASA conference, the focus will be on DoblAI, an advanced AI tool for audio segmentation and speaker diarization. This innovative tool employs sophisticated video analysis algorithms to accurately and efficiently transcribe, translate, and dub videos. DoblAI signifies a notable advancement, offering archival professionals a powerful solution for managing and disseminating audiovisual content across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. The presentation will dive into its functionalities and implications for archival practices in an AI-driven era, emphasizing its transformative impact on the preservation and accessibility of cultural heritage materials.
Beyond its role as a training, FRAME Advanced 2023 facilitated a sense of community and collective growth among participants, leaving us enriched and motivated to grow as professionals. As preparations are underway to share the insights gleaned from this transformative workshop, there is a palpable eagerness to convey the innovations and learnings derived from the event.

➺ PARADISEC creates tertiary-level curricula, focusing on discipline-specific archiving practices in Linguistics, Anthropology, and Ethnomusicology
--
Julia Colleen Miller, Nick Ward (Long presentation)
--
Established in 2003, the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) is a collaborative project based at three Australian universities: The University of Sydney, The University of Melbourne, and the Australian National University. Serving as a digital archive and access platform, PARADISEC focuses on preserving endangered materials from the Pacific region, encompassing Oceania, East and Southeast Asia. These materials are primarily contributed by researchers specialising in Linguistics, Anthropology, Ethnomusicology, and related fields.

Operating within academic research institutions provides PARADISEC with direct engagement opportunities with students and researchers. Recognising the importance of integrating archival practices into tertiary education, PARADISEC has developed tailored curricula for Linguistics, Anthropology, and Ethnomusicology. The curriculum emphasises data management, archiving, and digital preservation, with a focus on safeguarding linguistic and cultural heritage.

Through practical training sessions, students acquire essential skills for managing and preserving diverse data types, including linguistic recordings and ethnographic materials. They are introduced to industry-standard tools and techniques for digitisation, metadata creation, and ensuring long-term preservation.

The integration of discipline-specific archiving practices into tertiary education aligns with PARADISEC's mission to empower students and researchers in responsibly managing cultural and linguistic resources. The curriculum has been successfully implemented for credited job placements for institutions like Charles Sturt University (AUS) and the University of Manchester (UK). Its effectiveness has led to its adoption for training staff and volunteers, and there is growing interest from university course convenors to add this content to their courses beyond the occasional guest lecture.


➺ A manual for the restoration of the sound of amateur films
--
Jean-Baptiste Masson (Short presentation)
--
This paper presents an on-going project conducted at the Université of Rennes-2 and at the Cinémathèque de Bretagne, that aims to produce a manual for the restoration of the sound of amateur films. Amateur films are usually seen as silent, while a vivid practice of sound recording existed in parallel. Since the 1930s, amateur cinema magazines have documented the recording of soundtracks, first on instantaneous discs, then on magnetic tapes. For amateurs, the norm was to record image and sound on two separate media and to synchronise the two afterwards.
In France, the collection and safeguarding of amateur films and sound recordings are mainly undertaken by local archives (such as the Cinémathèque de Bretagne), who have acquired an expertise in the digitalisation and management of sub-standards. However, until recently, sound has remained the poor relation and sonic materials have rarely been taken into consideration. A number of amateur films then appeared as silent while soundtracks exist(ed). Thus, this project aims to give a voice to films that were until now deprived of one and seeks to highlight the sonic collections that are often present in local archives (around 3000 recordings are kept by the Cinémathèque de Bretagne). These amateur collections represent voices that are usually not present in history books and national archives.
This project also intents to give practical advices to local archives that often work on a constraint budget and with limited human resources.

➺ Praxis and Partnership: How Archival Training Programs Support the Audiovisual Archiving Field
--
Kimberly Tarr (Short presentation)
--
Education and training programs can prepare the next generation of archival professionals for practical work in the field while strengthening the foundation of audiovisual archives. Partnering with smaller archives, historical societies, and arts organizations, New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) program has anchored student-led collection assessments and internships to support and build the capacity of institutions. An express interest has been placed in supporting repositories that seek to amplify less mainstream and counter-culture narratives, such as Visual AIDS, La MaMa Theatre Archives, and the City University of New York’s (CUNY) Center for Puerto Rican Heritage. MIAP students have made a deep and lasting impact on the condition and accessibility of audiovisual collections locally, nationally, and internationally. Informed by Paulo Freire's pedagogical approach, praxis can be defined as “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it.” This session argues that praxis is essential in training audiovisual archivists and discusses how the MIAP program’s emphasis on providing a theoretical foundation with practical, real-world experience, has supported both its students and audiovisual archives globally since its founding twenty years ago.

➺ An update: IASA-TC 07 Guidelines for the Preservation of Born-Digital Video
--
Somaya Langley, Joshua Ng, Julia Miller, Crystal Sanchez, Brianna Toth (Short presentation)
--
The Guidelines for the Preservation of Born-Digital Video are currently in the early stages of development. Discussion about the need for guidance on born-digital video began in 2016. At the 50th IASA conference in 2019, it was agreed that this would take the form of TC 07, however the approach to development would differ from previous IASA Technical Committee guidelines. In 2023 the draft layout of the guidelines for open contributions by the IASA and audiovisual preservation community was launched.

After a hiatus of several years, there is now a core IASA-TC 07 organising committee consisting of Joshua Ng (Archives New Zealand), Julia Miller (IASA Technical Committee, Australian National University), Andrew Martin (Vice President (Communications) IASA Executive Board), DAMsmart), Somaya Langley (IASA Technical Committee, Science Museum Group), Brianna Toth (Smithsonian Institution), and Crystal Sanchez (Smithsonian Institution).

This presentation will provide an update on the current progress of the guidelines. The outline of the guidelines will be briefly discussed, as well as the next steps for development, how the core team intend to identify and allocate sections to members of the community for their contributions, and a review of the approach so far.

The draft guidelines can be found at: https://bit.ly/borndigitalvideo

Meeting of the IASA Journal Editorial Board (Accessible to the IASA Journal's Editorial Board members only).

Current IASA Journal editorial board members

IASA Journal Editor: Jennifer Vaughn, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Digital News Archive, Czechia
IASA Journal Managing Editor: Marija Dumnić Vilotijević, Institute of Musicology of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Serbia
IASA President: Patrick Midtlyng, Head of Recorded Sound Section, Library of Congress, USA
North America Representative: Lindsay Mattock, Associate Professor/MLS Program Coordinator, East Carolina University, USA
North America Representative: Dra. Perla Olivia Rodríguez Reséndiz, Researcher, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México
Australia-Pacific Representative: Dr. Ahmad Faudzi Musib, Sound Synthesis, Audio Engineering, and Preservation, Music Department, Faculty of Human Ecology, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Malaysia
Australia-Pacific Representative: Dr. Diana Chester, Sound Studies Scholar, Media and Communications, University of Sydney, Australia
Asia Representative: Maxim Nasra, Head of Preservation and Conservation, Distinctive Collections, Qatar National Library, Qatar
Asia Representative: Dr. Christian Poske, Research Associate, Music and Minorities Research Center (MMRC), University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Austria
Europe Representative: Dr. Carolyn Birdsall, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Africa Representative: Dr. Lekoko Sylvester Kenosi, Associate Professor, Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
South America Representative: José Augusto Mannis, PhD, Full Professor, Music Department, Arts Institute, State University of Campinas - Unicamp, Head of the Acoustics and Sound Arts Laboratory - LASom, Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil 
South America Representative: Ana Masiello, Conservator and Restoration Specialist, National Institute of Musicology "Carlos Vega", Ministry of Culture, Argentina

The aim of today's session is to coordinate future discussions for the National Archives Group by planning a series of virtual meetings throughout the year. These meetings will address topics of mutual interest, to be determined collaboratively by the group. Potential subjects for discussion include Updating acquisition policies, Managing privacy and copyright concerns in preserving digital materials (in the cloud and locally), and Exploring the opportunities and challenges posed by AI in institutional contexts.

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

➺ Jonas Kucharsky - (Un)Like Shazam: Towards an AI Model of Sound Recognition in Archival Context (Short presentation)

➺ Sami Meddeb, chaouki ben alia , chedly ganouchi - Preserving the Authenticity of Radio Archives Amidst the Evolution of Artificial Intelligence and Synthetic Media (Short presentation)

➺ Stefan Kaltseis - Can you read what you hear? A Report on an ongoing project implementing speech recognition at the Austrian Mediathek (Short presentation)


**Abstracts:**


➺ (Un)Like Shazam: Towards an AI Model of Sound Recognition in Archival Context
--
Jonas Kucharsky (Short presentation)
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One of the crucial issues of sound archiving in a film archive context is content identification, as period film sound can be stored in various formats on various media (optical soundtracks, sepmag, commag, tape, mono, stereo, etc.). Without proper identification, historical sound is never truly preserved, however ear analysis and meticulous comparison of preserved sound archivalia with film works can be a lengthy and complex process. This presentation focuses on possible means of automatic sound recognition and categorization on a case study of production magnetic tapes and foley recordings preserved in the Národní filmový archiv in Prague.

The initiative delves into the complexities of sound recognition. By examining algorithmic methods of sound analysis (e.g. spectrogram cross-correlation, audio fingerprinting etc.) the paper presents multiple approaches to identifying and categorizing foley sounds. These techniques not only facilitate the identification of sound from deteriorating magnetic tapes but also serve as the foundation for creating an AI model that can recognize and classify archival sound recordings.

This research sheds light on the significance of advancing sound archiving practices through algorithmic methods and emerging AI technologies. By offering insights about our work in progress, the project also aims to create an international dialogue about possible means of collaboration on open datasets and methods of sound categorization and identification. The broader implications for sound archiving underscore the potential of algorithmic methods and AI models to safeguard and revitalize our audiovisual heritage, ensuring that the rich tapestry of foley sounds remains an enduring legacy for future generations.

➺ Preserving the Authenticity of Radio Archives Amidst the Evolution of Artificial Intelligence and Synthetic Media
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Sami Meddeb, chaouki ben alia , chedly ganouchi (Short presentation)
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Over the past year, technological advancements in artificial intelligence have witnessed remarkable progress, leading to the emergence of deepfakes and synthetic media. This development poses a significant threat to the authenticity of digital archives, particularly those of Tunisian radios.
These archives are essential resources not only for understanding history but also for reporting and investigations. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure their long-term reliability and integrity.
Hence, the following question arises: How can we ensure the reliability and integrity of digital media archives, especially those of Tunisian radio?


➺ Can you read what you hear? A Report on an ongoing project implementing speech recognition at the Austrian Mediathek
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Stefan Kaltseis (Short presentation)
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A comparison with the digital turn of the late 20th century comes to mind. In the 1990s, the invention of digital formats such as WAVE was all about the possibilities of permanently preserving analogue A/V media and making it accessible. With the establishment of AI systems, another digital turn is now on the horizon. Speech recognition and other indexing of digital audiovisual media through AI-based methods is the next major intervention into the core of audiovisual archives. Compared to digitalization, however, speech recognition does not serve as a means of safeguarding, but rather as a meaningful enrichment.
The Austrian Mediathek is currently in the process of integrating the open-source-based speech recognition tool Whisper, which was published by OpenAI in 2022, into the archive's digitization workflow. The resulting metadata – in the form of automatically created txt- and timecoded srt-files – should not only serve the desired accessibility, but above all significantly improve and simplify searchability and findability within the catalogue system.
The lecture will give an overview of the development of this ongoing project and will answer questions about the advantages and disadvantages of textualization of acoustic sources.
Tagging that will be easier to carry out and a more precise indexing of audiovisual content will be discussed, as well as the possibilities of better findability: can hidden treasures be found this way? But the question of what happens when we make the audiovisual archive "readable" should not remain unasked. After all, listening to the sources should not be replaced.

This session consists of 5 presentations and a joint Q&A with the presenters. The session contains:

➺ Eric Dawson, William Isom - Uncovering, Sharing and Preserving Black Stories in Southern Appalachia (Long presentation)

➺ Gustavo Navarro - Trabajadores Migrantes en los Complejos Mineros de la Patagonia Austral (Argentina) (Short presentation)

➺ Laura Batitucci, Glênis Cardoso - Focusing on the Queer Super-8 films Digitized by the Digitalização Viajante (Traveling Digitization) Project in Brazil (Short presentation)

➺ Jo Ana Morfín, Sandra Real - Performing Archives: building the history of Movimiento Discotheque in México (Short presentation)

➺ María Domínguez - Sin grandes archivos ni colecciones, exploramos películas del pueblo Asháninca en la selva central del Perú. (Short presentation)


**Abstracts:**


➺ Uncovering, Sharing and Preserving Black Stories in Southern Appalachia
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Eric Dawson, William Isom (Long presentation)
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The Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound (TAMIS) holds a large collection of audio-visual materials created in and related to the Appalachian region. It has worked with many community partners, including Black in Appalachia, which seeks to highlight the history and contributions of African-Americans in the development of the Mountain American South and its culture. This program will detail several collaborative projects between the two organizations, with Black in Appalachia incorporating TAMIS materials into documentaries that tell untold or little-known stories, such as that of Black Impressionistic artist Beauford Delaney’s origins in Knoxville, Tennessee, and the 1919 Knoxville race riots, which led to the preservation of a forgotten 1919 newsreel. Excerpts from the films will be shown.

➺ Trabajadores Migrantes en los Complejos Mineros de la Patagonia Austral (Argentina)
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Gustavo Navarro (Short presentation)
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La Patagonia Argentina es la región más austral, caracterizada por el aislamiento, las grandes distancias, y un entramado social particular conformado por distintos movimientos migratorios. A principio del siglo XX, su desarrollo económico comenzó con la creación de estancias para la cría de ovejas por parte de inmigrantes procedentes de Europa, galeses, españoles, croatas, ingleses e italianos; el segundo movimiento de inmigrantes provino de las provincias del norte que en los años 50 se radicaron para trabajar en el petróleo; décadas después, en los años 90, otra inmigración interna también llegó de las provincias del norte para trabajar en las minas.
La Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia Austral ha digitalizado un gran volumen de material documental (actas y memorias) para su preservación; sin embargo, la historia oral ofrece nuevas miradas y perspectivas vacantes en la historiografía local. El presente trabajo propone la creación, preservación y acceso al patrimonio sonoro de la región patagónica. Se prevé la creación de una colección de testimonios de trabajadores inmigrantes de las minas; se propone la reconstrucción de sus historias de vidas y los modos de sociabilidad en esas comunidades geográficamente aisladas.
Se utilizará un software de gestión documental con metadatos de preservación, copias de seguridad y emulación de acuerdo al formato del archivo sonoro. Se pondrá a disposición de la comunidad a través del repositorio de objetos digitales “Memorias de la Patagonia Austral” (Ver: www.koluel.org).


➺ Focusing on the Queer Super-8 films Digitized by the Digitalização Viajante (Traveling Digitization) Project in Brazil
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Laura Batitucci, Glênis Cardoso (Short presentation)
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From October 2022 to February 2023, the project Digitalização Viajante (Travelling Digitization), developed by the Brazilian Film Digitization Initiative (IDFB) and the Brazilian Association for Audiovisual Preservation (ABPA), traveled through 6 different Brazilian cities (Brasília, Recife, João Pessoa, Teresina, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo) with a portable Super-8 and 8mm scanner and a portable workstation, digitizing in 2K over 300 films in different archives, houses and universities. The project aimed to address the lack of digitization initiatives in Brazil that focus on small-format amateur, independent, and "orphan" films. With some regions in Brazil lacking digitization facilities, there remains a gap in public access to the film histories of certain areas of Brazil and our project tried to address this.

The project Digitalização Viajante was successful in digitizing numerous works that had never been seen or had been forgotten over time. Among all the works we digitized, some represent a wave of radical queer cinema which took place within the Northeast of Brazil in the late 70s and early 80s. Films like "Closes" (1982), by Pedro Nunes, "Baltazar da Lomba" (1982), by the collective Nós Também, and "Era Vermelho seu Batom" (1983), by Henrique Magalhães, among many others, did not have a high quality digital copy yet and were on the verge of being lost.

This presentation intends to focus on the history behind these films and the context that they were made, but also on how the Travelling Digitization project was developed and executed.

➺ Performing Archives: building the history of Movimiento Discotheque in México
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Jo Ana Morfín, Sandra Real (Short presentation)
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On May 30, 2024—the date commemorating one year since "Música Sonidera" was designated as Intangible Heritage of Mexico City —the digital repository Memórica. México Haz Memoria will present the exhibition "Movimiento Discotheque" by the transwomen curator Aret Muñoz.
According to Aret Muñoz, the history of High Energy, Techno and Electronic Music in Mexico is built on five shared events: Territoriality, Dance, Graphic Identity, Sexual Dissidence, and Autonomous Technologies. Therefore, exhibiting the history of these Music movements will require a more creative approach than simply presenting digitized objects.
This exhibition aims to promote "making/doing" as a preservation approach, as well as connecting diverse communities of practice such as VJs, DJs, archivists, historians, street artists, and so on.
Based on the concept of materiality as relational patterns (Sorensen, 2007) and inspired by the strategy "performing archives” (Clarke, 2009), Memórica commissioned DJ Monstrua Movil Discotheque and VJ Chana to create five audiovisual artworks. These works will use archival materials such as traces, ephemera, sounds, photographs, and documentary videos, as well as oral memories, as means to “perform materiality”.
By "reanimating" legacies and transmitting new artworks to the public, new encounters and interactions will be generated, which will allow us to preserve transient forms of creation through experience, memory, "affect and circulation" (Schneider, 2013).


➺ Sin grandes archivos ni colecciones, exploramos películas del pueblo Asháninca en la selva central del Perú.
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María Domínguez (Short presentation)
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Iniciamos nuestra investigación, con la adquisición de una película casera de 16mm, en el sitio web de Amazon por parte de Ivonne Sheen, artista y cineasta de Lima, Perú. Esta película nos lleva a explorar la historia del pueblo Asháninca en la selva central del Perú, durante la década de 1930.

Con una duración aproximada de 3 minutos, la película muestra un grupo de Ashánincas desollando a un animal, sonriendo a la cámara y marchando. Hay personajes foráneos y un desfile del ejército peruano. La caja de cartón del rollo indica: “Rio Perené. El zoológico del Perené”; “Augusto Valle Riestra. Perené".

Con estos datos comienza la investigación de estas imágenes, el origen de esta película y su relación con la historia del pueblo Asháninca. En este proceso, hemos encontrado otra película amateur de la misma época y temática, realizada por Guill

This session consists of 4 presentations and a joint Q&A with the presenters. The session contains:

➺ Musicultura Group - Ethnomusicological Archives and Social Conflict: Reflections on the Musicultura Group Archive 2004-2023 (Short presentation)

➺ María Jesús Lopez - Against all odds: women in the first flamenco recordings = Contra viento y marea: mujeres en las primeras grabaciones del flamenco (Short presentation)

➺ Agostina Invernizzi - Archivos hospitalarios e irradiaciones de la película Nuestra Natacha (Julio Saraceni, 1944) en Argentina (Short presentation)

➺ Dimitrije Bužarovski, Trena Jordanoska - Individuals Archives and Social Networks – New Perspectives in AV Archiving (Long presentation)


**Abstracts:**


➺ Ethnomusicological Archives and Social Conflict: Reflections on the Musicultura Group Archive 2004-2023
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Musicultura Group (Short presentation)
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This presentation reflects on the collection generated from the activities of the Musicultura Group, which has been conducting participatory action research on music and its social impact in the favelas of Maré, Rio de Janeiro, for about twenty years. We discuss the relationship between the material generated in the research and the academic production of the group, bringing it to the creation of an archive made available for public access via a website. This stage of the work, became a priority due to the escalation of the police brutality and of violent conflicts in Rio de Janeiro's favela areas, particularly from 2019 onwards, and intensified with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Under these circumstances, a change of workspace was necessary, shifting from the Community Center for Citizenship Defense in Maré to the Escola de Música da UFRJ in Rio de Janeiro's city center. Subsequently, activities were carried out to organize, classify, and digitize this collection. This tool is envisioned as associated with the academic production carried out by Musicultura, contributing simultaneously to academic activities in the field of ethnomusicology and to knowledge production within the community itself. In this sense, strategies for dialogue with potentially interested local entities, such as public schools, memory centers, and social organizations, will also be addressed, allowing its utilization for interested groups and individuals as a reference for new possibilities in the production of collective memory, along with the return of the collection and of the group's activities to the community.

➺ Against all odds: women in the first flamenco recordings = Contra viento y marea: mujeres en las primeras grabaciones del flamenco
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María Jesús Lopez (Short presentation)
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Originally, flamenco performances were limited to family environments or very restricted gatherings aimed at a very specific audience. Over time, by the 19th century, the art form became professionalized and transitioned from popular and familial settings to stages. It was then that women, involved in both dance and singing, encountered rejection not only from their own families—who opposed women performing in taverns and live music cafés—but also from a deeply patriarchal society. Except for very exceptional cases, only those who sacrificed having a family life could pursue a professional career. In this presentation, we talk about recordings on wax cylinders and shellac records, preserved in the National Library of Spain, of those women who, breaking the stereotypes and barriers of their time, paved the way for those who came after them.



➺ Archivos hospitalarios e irradiaciones de la película Nuestra Natacha (Julio Saraceni, 1944) en Argentina
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Agostina Invernizzi (Short presentation)
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La pieza teatral Nuestra Natacha escrita por Alejandro Casona en 1935 es rápidamente acogida por el público y llevada al cine por Benito Perojo en 1936. La película homónima, según fuentes historiográficas, no se estrena, se pierde y confluye hasta la actualidad en un vacío para la historiografía del cine español. Juan Bonifacio Benavente (1987) y Román Gubern (1994) rastrean sus huellas a partir del análisis de publicaciones especializadas. La tesis de Juan Ramón Torreglosa (2016) comprende un estudio exhaustivo sobre la obra.
Tras su exilio, Casona se establece en Buenos Aires en 1939 y triunfa en la escena teatral colaborando, además, como guionista de cine. Nuestra Natacha es llevada nuevamente a las pantallas en 1944 por Julio Saraceni. El objetivo de este trabajo es actualizar un problema historiográfico e indagar sobre los sentidos irradiados por una narrativa que parte de las propuestas emancipatorias surgidas en la República, para desembarcar en la Argentina de transición de la Década Infame hacia el Peronismo. El trabajo se centrará en la recepción de la película a partir del estudio de fuentes historiográficas. Por otro lado, atenderá al análisis formal y a su relación con otros films corales de mujeres que circulan en este período en Argentina que tienen como foco la educación formal de las mujeres. La perspectiva utilizada combina nociones de la historia sociocultural de las mujeres, la teoría fílmica feminista y la historiografía del cine argentino. Se practicará una lectura hospitalaria de los archivos (Mónica Szurmuk, 2020) preocupada por expandir “tópicos que, en el contexto de su producción, pudieron resultar extemporáneos e impensables” (2020: 67).


➺ Individuals Archives and Social Networks – New Perspectives in AV Archiving
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Dimitrije Bužarovski, Trena Jordanoska (Long presentation)
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BuzAr (Buzarovski Archive) is undoubtedly an example of the new trends in the archiving of AV cultural heritage. With almost 3 TB of digitized and recorded AV materials (including 14 collections of folk songs, tales, customs, etc., documentary videos, recordings of concerts, Dimitrije Buzarovski's compositions, books, papers, etc.), BuzAr successfully accomplishes its mission for the preservation of Balkan cultural heritage. Established in 2012 as an archive based on the voluntary work of UKIM FM professors Dimitrije Buzarovski and Trena Jordanoska, it has become one of the major sources for Macedonian and Balkan music culture, housing over 70,000 audio, video, photo, text, and score files. In order to promote and make its digitized materials accessible, starting from May 28, 2021, the BuzAr YouTube channel was opened, with posts every four days. As of April 1, 2024, 287 videos have been posted. Additionally, a Facebook page was opened, linking to the YouTube channel and providing additional texts (in Macedonian) with explanations regarding the videos. Among the latest initiatives of BuzAr is MCMFS (Multimedia Corpus of Macedonian Folk Songs), where digitized recordings and transcriptions are combined with Sibelius score files and video recordings of performances made specifically for this occasion in 2023/2024, in an integrated video. BuzAr is an example of adjustments to new technologies, media, and particularly the competition with social networks, where individuals are making enormous contributions to the archiving processes of cultural heritage. In addition, BuzAr online files enable promotion and easy access and further indexing for AI use.

It is our great pleasure to invite you to the Open Meeting which will be held at the 55th Annual Conference in Valencia.

In order to stimulate the networking of archives' representatives and with hope that it will initiate future collaborations, we will have only one topic on our agenda -- brief presentations of research archives. Moderators