November 11, 2009

AMIA 2009: random notes

We are back from the 2009 Association of Moving Image Archivists conference in St Louis, which concluded Saturday. By we I mean myself, my WITNESS co-archivist Yvonne Ng, and our phenomenal interns Michele DeLia, Teague Schneiter and Valentina Catena.

Randomly, here are some things I saw or heard at AMIA that I liked:

WGBH’s Open Vault and “Vietnam: A Television History” archiving Project, with next-generation tools including annotation and citation options, and especially the topic map.

The term “Image-driven scholarship.”

Chris Lacinak’s presentation on “Accessioning and Managing File-based Born-Digital Content.”

PrestoPrime’s wiki for digital preservation.

CEDAR, a “collection of Collaborative Empirical Databases to be used as an Archivists’ Resource for work relating to Moving Image and Sound Preservation and Archiving.” – a Beta project from AudioVisual Preservation Solutions.

Mediapedia: A media identification tool, a work in progress at National Library of Australia.

Indiana Museum of Art’s online real-time (sorta) Dashboard shown by Suzanne M. Fischer as an example of “radical transparency in action.”

The St Louis Dispatch’s front-page story about the conference.

Johan Oomen’s slides from “Inside Out and Outside In: examples of user engagement in AV archives” about Open Images.

Tums_IMG_3023

Built 1888, last downtown factory in St Lou. Tums were invented in 1928.

DV Analyzer, a new tool from Audiovisual Preservation Solutions which does error-reporting on DV-to-digital transfers; it’s free!

MPEG Streamclip free video converter tool (as per Skip Elsheimer).

Dave Rice’s demo showing error concealment suppressed and replaced by white space – whoa!

 

“Streaming is for sissies.” Rick Prelinger, in “The Problem of Open Media” session.

Peter Kaufman’s statistic on rights clearance for BBC Creative Archive: 6300 staff hours to clear 524 hours of media…

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November 2, 2009

Khmer Legacies: Interview with Socheata Poeuv

The Hub is currently featuring a video interview with Socheata Poeuv, a visiting fellow at the Yale University Genocide Studies Program.  Poeuv is the founder and director of Khmer Legacies, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the history of the Cambodian genocide by recording video testimonials of its survivors. In this interview (conducted by Teague Schneiter), Poeuv reflects on how archives – and specifically Khmer Legacies’ video archives – help protect human rights by redefining the way we record, preserve, and ultimately understand genocide and mass atrocities. She discusses some of the particularities of video testimonies, as well as the ethical concerns inherent to the online distribution of video content. This video is part of our ongoing spotlight on The Role of Archives in Human Rights.

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October 30, 2009

Non-custodial archiving: U Texas and Kigali Memorial Centre

Non-custodial archival practices and the UT Libraries Human Rights Documentation Initiative partnership with the Kigali Memorial Centre
By T-Kay Sangwand, Human Rights Archivist, Human Rights Documentation Initiative
University of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at Austin

With a generous grant from the Bridgeway Foundation, the University of Texas Libraries (UTL) launched the Human Rights Documentation Initiative (HRDI) in 2008. The HRDI is committed to the long-term preservation of fragile and vulnerable records of human rights struggles worldwide, the promotion and secure usage of human rights archival materials, and the advancement of human rights research and advocacy around the world. The idea for this project grew out of the “Human Rights Archives and Documentation: Meeting the Needs of Research, Teaching, Advocacy and Social Justice” conference held at Columbia University in 2007. UT Libraries is proud to join the ranks of other prestigious human rights archives within U.S. universities, such as the Center for Human Rights Documentation and Research at Columbia and The Archive for Human Rights at Duke University.

The Human Rights Documentation Initiative aims to preserve fragile human rights documentation, particularly born digital audiovisual materials, through partnerships with human rights organizations that are producing the digital content. We are currently working the Kigali Memorial Centre in Rwanda (administered by the U.K based genocide prevention group Aegis Trust) to digitize, preserve, and provide access to their video archive containing testimonies of survivors, perpetrators, and the Gacaca court proceedings.

Moving away from the traditional models of archival acquisition in which records are removed from their place of origin to be deposited into a distant repository, the HRDI bases its partnerships upon a non-custodial model of archival management. This idea draws upon Richard Pearce-Moses’ definition of postcustodial theory of archives, or “the idea that archivists will no longer physically acquire and maintain records, but they will provide management oversight for the records that will remain in the custody of the record creators.” As Pearce-Moses elaborates, “the postcustodial theory shifts the role of the archivists from a custodian of inactive records in a centralized repository to the role of a manager of records that are distributed in the offices where the records are created and used.”

In practice, this means that the Kigali Memorial Centre retains the original records that they create while the HRDI obtains digital copies of these materials. Using its archival and technical expertise, the HRDI staff works with the KMC Documentation Centre staff to establish storage recommendations, file naming conventions, and workflow practices that will build and improve KMC’s archival capacity into their documentation activities. Through the UT Libraries, the HRDI provides secure digital storage for the KMC files in the case that any damage befalls the original recordings. Additionally, the HRDI provides the technology that will enable widespread access to KMC materials. Due to limited bandwidth throughout Rwanda, KMC is currently unable to host online access to their content. To overcome this issue, KMC will digitize, catalog, and index materials on-site and transfer the materials to UT, where they will be stored, preserved, and hosted.

In order to facilitate access to KMC materials, the HRDI has been working with the Guatemala-based company, Glifos, that provides powerful software that allows for cataloging, indexing, and syncing audiovisual materials with transcripts and other materials for enhanced access. Using Glifos, the HRDI built a prototype for a digital archive for KMC and in July 2008, three members of the HRDI project team (Christian Kelleher, T-Kay Sangwand, and Amy Hamilton) traveled to Rwanda to demo the prototype.

Rwanda

Photo caption (left to right): Yves Kamuronsi (Director, Documentation Centre, Kigali Memorial Centre), T-Kay Sangwand (Human Rights Archivist, UT HRDI), Christian Kelleher (Project Manager, UT HRDI), Honorable Jean de Dieu Mucyo (Executive Secretary, National Commission for the Fight Against Genocide), James Smith (co-founder and CEO of Aegis Trust), Freddy Umutanguha (Director, Kigali Memorial Centre)

The trip to Rwanda was productive and rewarding, particularly due to Kigali Memorial Centre’s positive and enthusiastic response to the prototype. During our two week stay in Rwanda, the HRDI team presented the prototype on seventeen different occasions to a wide range of parties who would be key stakeholders in the building of a National Genocide Archive, including: the Audio Archives at ORINFOR (Rwandan Office of Information), Ibuka (national survivors organization), Minister of Education, National Commission for the Fight against Genocide, National Data Center, Rwanda Development Board – Information Technology, National Museum, Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency , as well as the U.S. and U.K. Ambassadors to Rwanda. The project team even had the opportunity to present at the National Commission for the Fight against Genocide Conference on the Project of Setting up a Documentation and Research Centre alongside James Smith, co-founder and CEO of Aegis Trust, and representatives from the archives of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the Gacaca Courts. The UT Libraries Human Rights Documentation Initiative is extremely excited about exploring potential partnerships with these different parties through its collaboration with the Kigali Memorial Centre.

Due to the sensitive nature of the information contained in the testimonies, the KMC materials are not yet publically available. Over the next six months the Kigali Memorial Centre and the HRDI will secure the proper permissions from testimony givers and build out the digital archive for public access. We anticipate launching the project in April 2010 for the Sixteenth Annual Genocide Commemoration.

For more information on the Human Rights Documentation Initiative, its partnership with the Kigali Memorial Centre, and the other organizations involved with the UT Libraries Human Rights Documentation Initiative, please visit: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/humanrights (launching early November 2009).

NOTES:

(1) This concept and its application to the UT Libraries Human Rights Documentation Initiative comes from my colleague Christian Kelleher, project manager of the HRDI, and his numerous presentations on the topic.

(2) Pearce-Moses, Richard, “A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology: postcustodial theory of archives,” Society of American Archivists, http://www.archivists.org/glossary/term_details.asp?DefinitionKey=327.

(3) Ibid.

(4) The prototype was completed in record time thanks to wonderful work of the HRDI project team – Doug Barnett (UT Libraries Chief of Staff), Aaron Choate (Head, Technology Integration Services), Jessi Fishman (Resident Librarian), Amy Hamilton (Undergraduate Student Researcher), Ladd Hanson (Head, Library Systems), Christian Kelleher (Archivist / Project Manager), Anna Lamphear (Resident Librarian), Jennifer Lee (Head, Preservation), Amy Rushing (Metadata Librarian), T-Kay Sangwand (Human Rights Archivist), Kevin Wood (Senior Systems Analyst). http://www.archivists.org/glossary/term_details.asp?DefinitionKey=327.

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October 28, 2009

Building a Network for Human Rights Archives and Archivists

By Valerie Love, Curator for Human Rights Collections
The Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut

In recent years, archival institutions and organizations have become increasingly concerned with issues regarding human rights records and archival collections. Questions of access, privacy, politics, trust, and ensuring the safety of those documenting abuses and potentially controversial records all impact archivists working with human rights collections. Furthermore, the difficult subject matter contained in records of human rights abuses may require additional support for processing archivists who must confront images and accounts of atrocities daily.

In the past several years, a growing number of resources and conferences have been created to assist archivists and human rights practitioners working with human rights documentation. The WITNESS Hub Blog has compiled some of the most prominent of these resources at: http://hub.witness.org/ArchivesHumanRights

In 2003, the International Council on Archives (ICA) established a Working Group on Archives and Human Rights at the International Conference of the Round Table on Archives (CITRA) in Cape Town, South Africa, to ensure follow up and coordination of the projects arising from the conference resolutions: http://www.ica.org/en/node/621. The working group posts information on its website, and publishes a newsletter providing updates on human rights archival activities from around the world.
In 2008, the University of Connecticut established a Human Rights Archives Email Listserv to foster communication between archivists and human rights practitioners interested in human rights documentation. The listserv is open to anyone who is interested, and currently has over 100 members from around the world. Join at https://listserv.uconn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=HR_ARCHIVES-L

Yet, despite the proliferation of conferences and online information sites regarding human rights archives, there is not yet a space or group within the largest archival organization in the United States. T-Kay Sangwand of the University of Texas and I are currently petitioning to create a human rights roundtable within the Society of American Archivists (SAA). Informal gatherings of archivists concerned with human rights issues occurred at the SAA meeting in San Francisco in 2008 and at Austin in 2009, but the creation of a official roundtable would formalize current efforts to collaborate and share information on archives and human rights in the United States.

Statement of Purpose and Goals of the Human Rights Archives and Archivists Roundtable
The Human Rights Archives and Archivists Roundtable aims to create a space for SAA members and other stakeholders (human rights advocates, scholars, government officials, and non-governmental organization workers) to increase dialogue and collaboration on issues related to the collection, preservation, disclosure, legal implications and ethics of human rights documentation.

Goals:

1. To foster dialog between archivists working with human rights collections and other stakeholders on issues related to the management, preservation, and access to human rights archives.

2. To disseminate information to roundtable members and members of SAA, and to formalize grassroots efforts to organize around human rights issues within SAA and in conjunction with the International Council on Archives Human Rights Working Group

3. To establish a formal presence within SAA and create an official venue for the exchange ideas affecting human rights archival collections

a. Integrate the current Human Rights Archives email listserv with other SAA lists
b. Develop a Human Rights Archives Roundtable website
c. Create an electronic newsletter to share news and publicize events

4. To facilitate collaboration and information sharing among archival institutions, universities, governments, legal bodies, and non-government agencies that are working to document and preserve records of human rights abuses

If you are a member of SAA and would be interested in learning more or joining, please contact valerie.love@uconn.edu. The Roundtable will be discussed at the February 2010 SAA Council meeting, and, pending approval, will hold its first meeting at the Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting in Washington DC in August 2010.

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October 27, 2009

World Day for Audiovisual Heritage: Archiving for Human Rights

World Day for Audiovisual Heritage

World Day for Audiovisual Heritage

Today is World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, started in 2005 by UNESCO in order to help “build global awareness of the various issues at stake in preserving audiovisual heritage.” These issues include deterioration and loss due to time, handling, improper storage, format obsolescence, and poor documentation, and they continue to threaten much of the world’s moving image heritage.

Among these irreplaceable materials are collections devoted to human rights, especially as audiovisual documentation becomes an increasingly important component in human rights campaigns. We are therefore marking the day by taking a deeper look at the role of archives in protecting human rights. From challenging impunity to helping advance restorative justice in countries like Cambodia and Rwanda, archives around the world are proving increasingly crucial for human rights memory and advocacy.

This year’s effort was put together by Teague Schneiter, a current MA candidate at University of Amsterdam’s Presentation and Preservation of the Moving Image program, as part of her internship with both the Hub and the Media Archive.

Get involved by checking out the videos, resources, readings, and the first in a series of interviews with human rights archivists. And we would love thoughts and feedback!

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October 26, 2009

Your Archive Deserves Advocacy

Tomorrow is UNESCO World Day for Audivisual Heritage. Our good friends at Audiovisual Preservation Solutions have issued a callout for stories of audiovisual preservation as part of a “project designed to garner support for audiovisual archive preservation planning and project implementation from influencers, policy makers and funding organs,” which they have christened YOUR ARCHIVE DESERVES ADVOCACY (YADA).

“These stories will be published on our website, and some will be selected for use in our ongoing efforts to inform private and public funding decision makers, both of what is being achieved, and what can be achieved with their support.”

Read the AVPS blog for more, and watch the same space tomorrow for a profile of The Jazz Loft Project, “an excellent example of how a person or organization convinced of the cultural value of previously inaccessible audiovisual content was able to garner the support necessary to both make unique materials accessible, and to preserve them for posterity.”

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October 20, 2009

The magic of documenting documentation

Guest post from Sarah Van Deusen Philips:

As the project coordinator for human rights at the Center for Research Libraries-Global Resources Network, my primary task is to engage with the life-cycle of human rights documents, which I do through our Electronic Resources Study.  In this study, I am busy speaking to human rights field workers, administrators and archivists, trying to learn how they think about the documents that get produced during field work or during the day-to-day operations of a human rights organization: What do field workers do with the photos, videos, and testimonies they collect in the field?  How do those materials relate to the goals of human rights administrators?  And what would archivists desire of these materials in order to support the long-term life of documents as a resource for sustained activism, scholarship, legal action, and policy making?  These are the questions that thread through my work and conversations from one day to the next, and I could write a post about these from a pragmatic, distanced, professional point of view where I report on findings and trends to date, but I think I would like to take this opportunity to take off my project coordinator hat for a moment and speak as myself about my own feelings about why we need to document documentation.

You see, I am not an archivist or a preservationist—I am an academically trained anthropologist. And as an anthropologist, documentation is at the heart of my research.  To me, it is second nature to come home at the end of a day in the field, sit down with a cup of tea and begin logging and processing the materials I collect.  Photos must be labeled and cataloged, context notes recorded; videos must be backed up,  and the back up and the original must be labeled and catalogued; field notes must be typed up and details filled in before I forget them.  And—you guessed it—those notes must be labeled and catalogued.  This is part of who and what I am as an anthropologist—if I don’t take the time to organize my materials, I don’t have any data.  And without data, how can I make any sort of reasonable claim that I know the people I work with—the conditions of their lives or the patterns of their social structures?  How can I tell their story in a way that is meaningful and valid?  What’s more, how can I be a good advocate for the community I work with (in my case, deaf children and families seeking resources for them), if I can’t support claims with evidence?  Anthropologists are often activists as well as academics—how can we not be when we know what we know about marginalized groups?

So imagine my surprise when I learned that, though human rights workers value the materials and information that they collect in the field, more often than not, they don’t take the time at the end of the day to do what I do with my field materials.  In asking archivists who work within human rights organizations about this phenomenon, I frequently hear that this is because there isn’t any real institutional support for enforcing practices that would require field workers to catalogue and organize their materials for future use. It isn’t that administrators and field workers don’t value archiving; in an abstract, intellectual way they do.  But there seems to be a fear of imposing on the valuable time of field workers during crisis situations or of burdening them with a dull, administrative task that would detract from the passion and idealism of fighting the good fight.  Field workers are in the here and now, they are idealists, and they have a pressing and immediate problem to solve.
But where does that leave that treasure trove of materials that they collect?  Just ask the archivists—they’ll tell you that those materials are at best disorganized and at worst useless for continued work because all knowledge of who, what, where, and when has been lost. Without this information, these materials can’t support continued activism, policy making, or legal work.  They aren’t admissible in a court of law, they can’t serve as supporting data for a policy argument, and they can’t be used to help nations remember their sordid pasts and the fights they fought.  And this is a sad thing.

But there is a simple solution to this—magic!  Yes, we anthropologists believe in magic and transformational moments, not just for objects, but for people too.  With a little bit of time and mentoring, we can magically turn quality time with field materials into the incisive tool that an organized body of data is!  I learned the magic of transforming field materials from mere objects into data from a mentor in an hour and a half.  In that magical transformation from material to date, they gain voice of their own that I can draw on for years to come, but also for my immediate situation.  You see, some of the most important insights I have about my field—the origin of new questions or the recognition of important patterns—emerge from that time at the end of the day when I sit down with a cup of tea to organize and catalogue my materials.  I learn so much about the people and situations I work with when I relive their experiences through quality time with the materials I bring back—I gain a sharper focus for what I should be watching for and for actions I could take to better people’s lives.  Viewed this way, then, why wouldn’t field workers be excited by their materials?  If cataloguing becomes not just a drudgery for administrative purposes, but a tool for personal insight and action, then who wouldn’t be motivated by their ideals to the discipline necessary to gain such insights?

Sarah blogs regularly on The Documentalist.

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October 20, 2009

Re-Stalinization and revisionism in Russia

Last week  Russian historian Mikhail Suprun was arrested by Russia’s FSB security service for – as Truthdig put it – daring to study Russian history; more specifically, Stalin’s gulags.  Suprun’s  archives were confiscated; a police official who provided access to archive documents about gulag victims was also arrested.  Suprun faces up to four years in jail if convicted.
“Suprun had been researching Germans sent to Russia’s Arctic gulags. A professor of history at Arkhangelsk’s Pomorskiy university, his study included German prisoners of war captured by the Red Army as well as Russian-speaking ethnic Germans, many from southern Russia, deported by Stalin. Both groups ended up in Arkhangelsk camps.”

The ongoing effort to rehabilitate Stalin has been widely noted; read Jonathan Brent in the Chronicle of Higher Ed for an in-depth analysis.  The arrest of Suprun, the raid on Human Rights Center Memorial last year, and the increasing suppression of access to Russian archives, again show the profound linkage of archival control to political power.

Last month in a Global Post article,  Miriam Elder described the Gulag Museum as “little-visited,” and quoted Oleg Kalmykov, the museum’s archivist: “If we don’t exhibit this material, then the view that Stalin was a good manager and great war hero will win.”
ARTICLE 19 has released a legal analysis and statement (reported here on IFEX) urging Russian lawmakers to block passage of proposed legislation that, in their words: “is part of a drive by the Government to impose an official view of the country’s controversial history. ARTICLE 19 believes that this law infringes on the right to seek historical truth and fails to meet international standards for free expression.”

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October 16, 2009

Amnesty International Asset Management System

The International Secretariat of Amnesty International has launched their new digital asset management system, called ADAM; while mostly an intranet serving AI sections worldwide, there is a public site with a small selection of searchable content. See the Documentalist for a full description.

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October 15, 2009

Mandela opens archives for new book

The personal archive of Nelson Mandela will be opened for a new memoir; rights the collection of diaries, letters and other writings were auctioned this week at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

From the Guardian UK:

“Mandela himself, who bestowed these “traces of my life and those who have lived it with me” on his eponymous foundation, hopes the collection will afford the world a glimpse into his mind and his past.

“Anyone who has explored the world of archives will know that it is a treasure house, one that is full of surprises, crossing paths, dead ends, painful reminders and unanswered questions,” he said.”

In his address at the ceremony to launch the Centre of Memory and Commemoration/Mandela Foundation in 2004, Mandela said:

“In our view the work of archives in the South Africa of today is potentially one of the most critical contributions to restoration and reconciliation. All of us have a powerful moral obligation to the many voices and stories either marginalised or suppressed during the apartheid era.”

At that ceremony former security policeman Donald Card – who had given evidence against Mandela at the 1964 Rivonia trial – returned two diaries written by Mandela during his Robben Island incarceration. Card had acquired them in 1971 in his capacity as censor, but already disillusioned by apartheid, stashed them secretly in a cupboard in his home. From Salon:

“A firm believer in apartheid, Card was sent volumes of confiscated correspondence after recruiting an informant who offered to decode political meanings in apparently innocuous personal letters. However, under the influence of the campaigning newspaper editor Donald Woods, the policeman decided Mandela was not a terrorist and resigned from the force in 1971. Because of an administrative error the correspondence continued arriving. Recognizing the notebooks’ value, he hid them, and after Mandela’s release in 1990 he made several attempts to hand them over, finally succeeding when the foundation set up a center of memory and commemoration and paid attention.”

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