Community Archiving Workshop at IASA/ICTMD 2023 Recap

Submitted by Tre Berney on Wed, 15/11/2023 - 20:18

Community Archive Workshop at IASA/ICTMD 2023 Recap

- guest blog from Kelli Hix, of Community Archiving Workshop -

2023 marked the first Community Archiving Workshop at an IASA Conference. Members of CAW, Istanbul University Central Library Ethnomusicology Department, and Z-1 Film Atölyesi joined with over forty IASA conference participants from fifteen countries to participate in the day-long workshop held in one of the beautifully hand-painted rooms at Istanbul University. The collections included recordings of Turkish folk music and the feature films in the Z-1 collection.

During the first half of the workshop, participants shared models for community-centered archiving, gained skills in av conservation and metadata creation, and presented on their organizations and projects. In the afternoon, participants formed smaller work groups and inventoried and assessed 28 video tapes and grooved discs from the collections. The inventory will serve as a foundation for IU and Z-1 Film Atölyesi’s future collection inventory efforts, and will support preservation planning and collection advocacy. True to the community spirit of the workshop, conference attendees brought in equipment and held a surprise video digitization demonstration, digitizing a sample tape from the Z-1 Film Atölyesi collection.

The CAW workshop model is flexible; each workshop is modified to meet the goals and needs of the partner organization and the community. Most workshops are open to the general community so that we can share a variety of technical skills and cultural knowledge by working with a collection. However, this workshop was only open for registered conference attendees, most of whom have some experience with audiovisual collections in a museum or archive setting. With this in mind, we decided to focus on deep technical training requested by the partners (like special sessions on grooved media), and on sharing resources and models for community-centered memory work that participants can use and share.

CAW as a workshop model and organization has existed for over a decade. Workshops at the annual Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) conference and Association of Tribal Libraries Archives and Museums (ATALM) conference are staples, and other workshops occur nationally and internationally by project and by request. We look forward to continuing to work with IASA. Thank you to our participants from Ghana, Botswana, Georgia, China, the US, Poland, Russia, Netherlands, Canada, Turkey, Austria, Slovenia, Mexico, South Africa, and Estonia.