WITNESS Media Archive

I returned last night from a brief but really productive symposium at the University of Connecticut, organized and hosted by the Dodd Center, home to the University’s human rights collections. The symposium was designed in part as a follow-up to last October’s conference at Columbia, and an effort to foster collaboration and resource-sharing among organizations – academic, NGOs, independent – holding human rights collections. There were perhaps twenty of us there which allowed for a lot of direct discussion, including with the keynote speakers, Patricia Wald, longtime US federal appeals judge who served on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and Trudy Huskamp Peterson, probably the foremost authority on human rights archives in the world.

Patricia Wald delivered the Sackler lecture on Monday to a general University audience; she spoke about problems in two areas of human rights law, women’s rights and criminal tribunals. Judge Wald also spoke to our smaller group the following day, sharing some perspectives on issues relating to documents of the ICTY. For example, who makes the decisions about what to save, where are the archives kept, who controls and who has access? Other complications result from the language differences, the sheer length of the trials, and standards of document authentication. She remarked that for the ICTY the archives of the Nuremberg trials were extremely useful, given the lack of other precedents for international tribunals.

Trudy Peterson spoke about a number of topics, including her work the past few years with the Guatemala Police Archives (Please see Kate Doyle’s article in the December 2007 Harper’s for more on the story of the Guatemala archive’s discovery and recovery) and about a recent visit to Sierra Leone. She also talked about several sets of documents seized from Iraq which have either been in or remain in US possession. In the case of some tens of thousands of boxes of documents removed by US and British forces in 2003, the ALA, SAA and other professional organizations are calling for their return to the Iraqi National Archives. (See the ALA resolution here . )

The list of possible issues for discussion was ambitious and of course we touched on only a few, but the day ended with some concrete plans for steps forward by creating a web portal as a vehicle for aggregating and sharing information about our organizations, collections, best practices, events, etc etc.

There was much more; I’ll try to report more in the next few days.

March 3 & 4, 2008: The Thomas J. Dodd Research Center and the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut is hosting a one and a half day symposium, “Human Rights Archives and Documentation: Transforming Ideas into Practice.” Speakers include Patricia Wald of the ICTY and Trudy Huskamp Peterson, former Acting Archivist of the US and expert on the records of truth commissions.

WITNESS has launched the HUB http://hub.witness.org. This is the first participatory site devoted to human rights media.

As archivists we would love to see participation from those in the archival community, including though not limited to the uploading of human rights related archival footage. The purpose of the site is to provide a platform for change and activism, but we believe the inclusion of older documentaries, footage and other media will be important to provide context and depth to any issues being spotlighted. We will be drawing on our own collection, but believe this is a tremendous opportunity to engage others who might hold human rights media to provide access to them, thus illuminating their ongoing relevance, and providing deeper understanding of current struggles and issues.

A follow up to the Association of Moving Image Archivists conference two weeks ago: WITNESS Archive staff attended an thoughtful session entitled “Recording Retribution: Issues in the Curation of, and Access to, Actuality Footage of War and Atrocity.” Speakers included staff from the Imperial War Museum, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Inkulla Media. Presentations focused on the tension between providing access to important historical footage and respecting the privacy and dignity of the individuals depicted. Various clips were shown to that tension.

- Footage of 1941 war ship being torpedoed and blown apart. No individuals are seen by the viewer. Without accompanying context, you would not know that you were watching the moment of death for the 850-some people on board. The question was raised: should this be allowed use for a commercial advertisement of a “blow out” sale?

- Footage of WWII soldiers in 1944 experiencing “shell shock” or post-traumatic stress disorder. Without accompanying context, we do not know that the doctor who shot the film intended it be used ‘for medical records only.’ If used for a documentary on the war, it is possible that living relatives might see the footage. Are we right to allow re-contextualization from private medical record to television broadcast?

Largely, archivists consider footage requests on a case-by-case basis. Generally, requests to archives for this type of footage for television commercials, advertising, video games, etc. are not considered appropriate use. When denied, the person requesting may accuse the archive of “censoring” requests and prohibiting access.

On the other hand, many archivists now seem to feel that ethical concerns are outweighed by the public seeing the footage – so many are providing digital access through streaming on their websites and on platforms like YouTube. One archivist observed that there are 44,000 images alone on YouTube relating to WWII. However, along with greater access comes the concern that the footage is being viewed (and perhaps commented on) by people who aren’t emotionally or ethically equipped to respond to the images in the way we intend or hope.

The session only touched the surface of the ethics-versus-access debate, but I am hopeful that further discussion will continue beyond the conference.

Former ICTY and ICTR prosecutor Richard Goldstone is leading a panel tasked with determining how to ensure future preservation and access for the records of Rwanda and Yugoslavia war crimes tribunals. The archives of both courts comprise - so far - millions of documents and tens of thousands of audio and video recordings. More at:

http://www.unobserver.com/layout5.php?id=3931&blz=1

Human Rights Archives and Documentation: Meeting the Needs of Research, Teaching, Advocacy and Social Justice. Hosted by Columbia’s Columbia Center for Human Rights Documentation & Research, the conference was really an excellent first step in promoting collaboration and dialogue among different kinds of organizations dealing with human rights materials. Participants included archivists from academic institutions, and advocates or archivists working for human rights organizations. Alison Des Forges spoke about retrieving documents in Rwanda after the genocide, Paul Dicker recounted the convoluted journey of the Iraqi Secret Police files of the Anfal from Iraq to the US; Kate Doyle told the tale of the discovery Guatemalan Nattional Police archives, just to name a few. A few of my takeaways:

–archivists are or are trying to address the shift to a wider definition of rights, including economic, social and cultural rights;

–archives are collecting two types of hr collections: those focused on the primary documents, whether engendered by regimes or perpetrators, or created by HR organizations, and those of human rights instituitions themselves, which document the work and methodologies of advocates and social justice movements.

–regarding the first, there is a real need to educate human rights organizations about the crucial role that archives play for truth-seeking and pursuit of justice - and not as mere research materials. The work of archivists does not inhabit the same urgent space as that of advocates dealing with life-and-death matters, but it is nonetheless crucial. The Special Tribunal for Cambodia is only now getting underway, 30 years after the genocide of 19750-79.

–regarding the second, there is tremendous interest on the part of academic institutions to collect and research the instituitonal records of ngos. HR organizations may be even less aware of this need. The growth of the NGO movement has been a remarkable phenomenon of the last 30 years; the ways that documentation, reporting and advocacy have evolved, have shifted legal frameworks, have changed the consciousness and assumptions within international community, is really important.

Suggestions were made that academic archives or perhaps the Center for Research Libraries might play a role in organizing trainings or develop collection management policies, but unless there is someone devoted at the organizations to actually perform this work, an archivist or records manager, I doubt there is much these would accomplish. It’s really a cultural and educational issue: adminstrators, boards, activists and donors need to be made aware of the relevance of collecting and documentation to their core missions. We need real-life stories that illustrate this, and also somehow demonstrate that without conscious, skilled and supported efforts, there is a continual irretrievable loss of documentation due to lack of infrstructure or protocols. There is some irony in hearing how courageous human rights defenders such as Alsion Des Forges have worked` to prevent the destruction of documents by criminal regimes, while some of our own records may be in peril due to ignorance or a lack of resources. By the time collections find repositories they may already be highly compromised.

There was much, much more which I may get to in coming days. If it can further the level of communication, resource-sharing and other collaboration among these constituencies, that alone will be an accomplishment.

Columbia Center for Human Rights Documentation & Research event, October 4-6, 2007: Human Rights Archives and Documentation: Meeting the Needs of Research, Teaching, Advocacy and Social Justice. Keynote by Juan Mendez and David Marwell, with speakers from the National Security Archive, the Cambodian Genocide Documentation Project at Yale, the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Human Rights Watch, and more.

WITNESS Media Archive Manager, Grace Lile, and I are attending the annual Association of Moving Image Archivists conference – held this year in Rochester, NY, the birthplace of Eastman Kodak. The conference, in its seventeenth year, draws over 500 media archivists, preservation lab technicians and others from around the world, and is an excellent forum to discuss with colleagues the myriad of preservation challenges our profession faces in this rapidly-changing world of media formats.

First up was the “Reel Thing,” a day-long session of presentations on technical innovations and archival projects from the field. This year’s topics included high quality playback of magnetic sound recordings afflicted with deterioration known as the “vinegar syndrome” (so-named for its characteristic vinegar odor); preservation of early motion picture color processes; and a presentation on the preservation of filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s films.

Thus far, I’ve attended sessions about E-bay and its implications for archives and collections; one on “Women in the Technical Professions;” a screening of Kodachrome films from archives around the world; and a screening of nitrate motion picture films (a particularly beautiful, but combustible, pre-1950 motion picture stock).

Tomorrow (Saturday) morning’s panels include one of particular interest and relevance to what we do at WITNESS – ‘Recording Retribution: Issues in the Curation of, and Access to, Actuality Footage of War and Atrocity.”

Check back in the coming days for more on our thoughts from that panel ….

-Chad

We did our session “Activism in the Archives: Working with Human Rights Collections” on Saturday. Patrick Stawski is the Human Rights Archivist at the Archive of Human Rights at Duke University. Patrick spoke about developing the collection there, and the importance of outreach and engagement. The AHR is now the home of the International Monitor Institute, an effort founded by Pippa Scott in the 1990s to support the work of criminal tribunals by collecting, organizing and indexing video evidence of human rights violations in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Iraq, and Burma. Read more at the Archive’s new website:
http://library.duke.edu/specialcollections/human-rights/index.html

Csaba Szilagyi of the Open Society Archives (and recently of Columbia University) spoke about transformations in human rights archives in the past few years due to new technologies and other developments. OSA recently collaborated with the Swedish Institute on a virtual, interactive exhibit in Second Life called Raoul Wallenberg’s Office, which features audio, links and virtual artifacts about Wallenberg, but also allows ‘visitars’ to interact with each other. http://www.osa.ceu.hu/secondlife/

Patrick, Grace, Csaba

There was much more, of course, but the common theme for me was archives as conscious and deliberate agents of change and justice-seeking, through outreach and engagement in both new forms and old.

I was privileged yesterday to hear the inimitable Studs Terkel on a panel about the Studs Terkel Oral History Center here in Chicago. He is an exemplar of the belief that the stories of ordinary people are important and meaningful, that they can be agents of social change, and that they should be documented and preserved.

Also yesterday was an excellent session on labor materials in Chicago film and video collections. The highlight was a presentation by Larry Duncan about Labor Beat, a locally-produced cable tv series on labor which ahs been running for the past 20 years. The show is independent but totally sustained through DVD sales and contributions from a number of unions and rnk-and-file members. check it out at www.laborbeat.org.

Howard Besser (NYU) & Caroline Rubens (Appalshop)