The roles and purposes of the many types of sound and audiovisual archives determine how they will relate to collections and their owners. The national archives of a given country usually have the role of maintaining the records of the government, part of which may include sound and audiovisual material. A national audiovisual archive may have the role of acquiring and maintaining the output of the commercial recording industry resulting in a strong relationship with the copyright owners. Such an archive may have legal status in some form, such as being a repository for legal deposit for audiovisual material produced within the country. A broadcast archive may be part of a government funded broadcaster or part of a commercial broadcasters’ asset management team. A research archive may be part of a government funded initiative or may exist within the faculty of a university department. Many archives and collections have some or all of these roles, and may occasionally need to expand their roles into other areas.

Sound and audiovisual archives, in line with other types of archives, concentrate upon three principal activities: collection building and management, preservation, and dissemination. Although ethical guidelines exist for some specific aspects of audiovisual archiving, no single statement of ethics from related archival organizations and institutions covers all of the activities of the IASA membership.

The following document provides a statement of principles relevant to each of the major activities undertaken by the different kinds of sound and audiovisual archives within IASA. Individual collectors and owners of private archives may also find the following principles useful as a guide for their ethical responsibilities relating to their holdings. These principles cover both present practice and future developments. References are also given to existing documents that may be helpful to IASA members.

Eight different roles may be encountered in the course of work in sound and audiovisual archives. Each of these roles may belong to a separate individual or group, but in some cases a single person or group can fulfil multiple functions.

• Creators of content that is subsequently recorded: including authors, composers, broadcast program makers and arrangers of pre-existing works. These people will often be the holders of copyright.
• Performers: the individuals or groups whose sounds, images, and movements are recorded.
• Recordists: those who actually affix the sound and audiovisual recordings on specific media. These include, for example, engineers in recording studios and collectors of field recordings.
• Intellectual Property owners: individuals, communities, organizations, or companies that have rights over original works and recordings. These may include creators of content, performers or their communities, and recordists, or their assignees.
• Depositors: individuals, groups, corporations, or institutions that deposit recordings in archives.
• Archivists: staff or owners of archives who organize collections and provide access to them.
• Technicians: specialized staff of archives and archival services who are responsible for the preservation of audiovisual carriers and the migration of data from one carrier to another. In some instances, they may also be responsible for restoration of sounds and audiovisual data.
• Users: those who access collections held in archives.

These roles are linked through their relationship to the audiovisual recordings and the data about those recordings. There are ethical issues related to each of these roles at various stages in the archival process. In the following, ethical principles applicable to the various roles are grouped around the basic archival tasks of acquisition, processing and preservation, and providing access.