Given the ongoing uncertainties for international travel, IASA’s conference will again be held online, from 27th to 30th September 2021.  And this year we introduce a new innovation: a series of daily sessions corresponding to different time zones that match our global presence. This ensures that everyone can participate, whatever the time in their home nation. Be part of our international community of sound and audiovisual archivists!

Call for presentations is open! https://2021.iasa-web.org/call-presentations

IASA wants our current inability to meet physically to be an opportunity to broaden our links with sound and audiovisual archives around the world. The IASA 2021 virtual conference comes at a historic moment as our lives have changed and, consequently, the way our archives work. The preservation of our sound and audiovisual memories has been the aim of IASA for more than half a century. Therefore, this conference is the space in which ideas, projects, and memory for the future are presented and exchanged.

Our virtual conference will be programmed according to three different time zones: the Americas, Europe/Africa, and Australasia. This allows anyone in the world to participate at suitable times, while creating a virtual bridge between nations across all continents. 

The conference programmes in each zone will be coordinated by the following institutions:

Radio y Televisión Nacional de Colombia (for America)
Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (for Europe and Africa)
Universiti Putra Malaysia (for Asia and Australasia) 

We want a strong dialogue that analyses the current situation and discusses the new generation of sound and audiovisual archives. We want to listen to voices from all over the world and try to close the gaps that separate us. Therefore, your participation is necessary to make the IASA 2021 Conference a unique space for reflection.

We intend to provide a virtual platform that gives presenters a choice of either live-streamed videos or pre-recorded videos. Live and pre-recorded presentations will be made available online according to the published schedule.

IASA welcome proposals for conference presentations on the following topics:

A.   From cataloguing to interoperable metadata

B.   AI applications for discovery and access

C.   Copyright and ethics 

D.   Digital preservation and conservation

E.   Research, dissemination, and publication

F.    Digital content management

G.   The current situation and problems in preserving our audio-visual memory

H.   New profiles in audiovisual archives and training 

Please submit your proposal by completing the form here: https://2021.iasa-web.org/call-presentations

After analyzing the global evolution of the covid-19 pandemic, FIAT/IFTA has decided to hold the 2021 World Conference in a virtual environment, but…don’t worry we will have a chance to meet in Cape Town in 2022! 

We are fully aware that a digital conference does not create the same experience as a live meeting, but it also significantly lowers the threshold for greater participation. With that in mind we do hope many of you will join us during the event. Save the new dates now and we look forward to seeing you on 19 to 21 October 2021.

The title of this year’s FIAT/IFTA conference is “Advancing the digital dividend”. The past year has shown that we need to be agile, able to rapidly adapt to change. We must continue to ensure our remit in acquisition, preservation, access and use is to the fore so that the archives can deliver on the promise of the social, cultural and economic leverage that they comprise. In other words, we must ensure that the digital dividend, the return to society of our efforts, becomes as large, as visible and as viable as possible. This is why the 2021 FIAT/IFTA World Conference programme features the following chapters:

• Digital preservation: an era of new challenges
• New actors, new models, new processes in MAM and metadata creation
• Relevance, engagement and distinctiveness: the archive as a public actor
• Archival value: between return on society and return on investment
• Local issues, global perspectives

Registration is now open!

We are pleased to announce that the next FIAF Congress, organized by the National Film Institute Hungary – Film Archive, is scheduled to take place in Budapest, Hungary, from 26-30 April 2022. The provisional title of the symposium is "The Visible Archive: Archiving, processing, digitizing,restoring and sharing non-feature film collections". You can consult the first newsletter of the 2022 Budapest Congress in English, French, or Spanish HERE.