AMIA’s Annual Conference brings together media professionals from around the world to address the best ways to preserve and provide access to our media heritage.

More than 650 professionals representing the world’s major media institutions gather each year for AMIA’s annual conference.  Attendees represent all areas of the community-corporate and national archives, media companies, libraries, historical societies, service providers, universities, and more.  Workshops, screenings, and more than 60 sessions programmed by working archivists to address the best ways to preserve and provide access to our media.

2020 Conference:  Online, November 17-20

While everyone’s first choice would be to meet in person, the pandemic makes a virtual event the safest way to be together this year. As we celebrate our 30th anniversary, starting in November this year, we do believe this is an opportunity to reimagine the conference as an online event that allows broader participation and new voices, is more affordable to attend, and can help us model ways of keeping what we learn as part of our next in-person experience.

The conference will be restructured a bit to make sure that content is delivered in digestible segments, with a real focus on offering opportunities to participate virtually in conversations with colleagues. Networking and personal interaction is a cornerstone of the conference and we want to provide as many opportunities as we can for attendees to connect over the emerging and salient topics in our field.

This is a test

As we’ve all attended more virtual events this year, one of the biggest lessons we’ve learned is that our in-person schedule doesn’t always translate well into a virtual event. It’s not uncommon at AMIA to start at 8am and leave our last event after 10pm – it’s a hard schedule to follow in front of a screen! It’s impossible when you factor in different time zones, work locations, and balancing new demands on your time.

Even more than the difficulty in scheduling, though, is wanting to connect more with colleagues we won’t be able to see this year! With everyone in differing (and often changing) stages of returning to the workplace, and new challenges coming at us every day, the ability to learn from and communicate with each other is paramount.

So, we are very happy to announce that in addition to the conference coming November 17-20, AMIA will have another virtual event in April, 2021 leading up (we hope!) to an in-person conference in November, 2021.  The April conference will be similar to the November conference with sessions, workshops, and screenings and the CFP will go out the first week in December.

More details about these events will follow shortly.

ARSC's 55th Annual Conference will be virtual!

ARSC is pleased to announce that it will host a virtual conference, May 13-15, 2021.
The virtual conference will include live presentations in an online conference platform, and recorded presentations made available for on-demand viewing in the Aviary online platform.

The call for virtual presentations is now open until January 4, 2021.

Please stay tuned for additional information.

We look forward to seeing you online in 2021!

On June 22 FIAT/IFTA will host a #webinar centred around “Acceptance Criteria in the Context of Massive Migration Processes”.

Our speakers, Miroslav Čuljat (Archives Programme Manager at RTE), Charlie Fairall (Videotape Engineering Advisor at the British Film Institute (BFI)) and Bruno Burtre (Business Development Consultant at NOA Archive), will be tackling the subject, providing answers to questions like:

“Knowing that it is impossible to closely examine every single second of every single item, when the archive content is in its digital form, how do we know that it is a true representation of the analogue originals?” and “Which are the possible approaches to defining quality for massive migration processes for audiovisual archives?”

Don’t forget to register if you are interested in participating!

The FOCAL International Awards, now in their 18th year, winners will be announced in a virtual programme streamed across FOCAL’s Vimeo, Facebook and YouTube channels hosted by Jo Caulfield, a stand-up comedian, presenter, and comedy writer who has worked with the biggest names and shows in British comedy.

All shortlisted nominees across 14 categories (Production, Restoration & Preservation, Janes Mercer Researcher of the Year) have been announced and available on FOCAL’s website https://focalint.org/awards/the-focal-international-awards-2021

These awards are the leading and most complete set of awards for the archive footage industry, we hope you can join us on the 24 June to honour all the nominees and celebrate with the winners.

For further details or to contact FOCAL – awards@focalint.org
www.focalint.org

Broadcaster archives are often rich and deep, with multi-genre collections containing a mix of in-house produced and third party content, and inevitable rights complexities and associated risk considerations.

This workshop will look at the opportunities and challenges facing broadcasters worldwide in providing archive access to a range of stakeholders with different interests – be that creative and commercial re-use by programme makers, filmmakers and journalists, or non-commercial access for the individual: students, academics and the public.

The session will focus on rights and regulations and will ask if, by necessity of their regulatory and copyright landscapes, Public Service Broadcasters (PSBs) and private broadcasters take differing approaches to rights and risk when they are providing archive services to the production community and beyond.

This workshop will be of interest to archivists, library managers, rights management experts and copyright lawyers in the FIAT/IFTA community, with an opportunity to hear from others and share experiences in the complex area of rights and risk management.

NOTE: This workshop will be limited to 40 participants, this is due to the format of the workshop.

Note: This workshop will be in Spanish.

During the first Workshop: Collaborate, Connect, Transform: challenges and opportunities for Latin American Archives at risk held at the IASA-FIAT/IFTA Joint Conference in 2020, showed the passion and commitment of Latin American archivists for the preservation of their audiovisual heritage, as well as the need to establish solid professional networks to build, from the diversity of each country, common solutions for Latin America.

One year after this initiative, FIAT/IFTA renews its commitment to Latin American professionals and organizes a new Spanish workshop in which the exchange of ideas and experiences is the true protagonist.

The second Workshop: Collaborate, Connect, Transform: challenges and opportunities for Latin American Archives at risk will be held on September 15 and will revolve around two main themes: the digitization and preservation of archives and cataloging models in the context of the television production.

We will have case studies from the archives of Telefé Noticias (Argentina) and the Televisión Nacional de Chile. The open dialogue around these topics will continue in the workshops on preservation and cataloging schemes that will have the participation of experts from Costa Rica, Cuba, Mexico, Uruguay, Colombia and Spain. The dialogue will be extended to the participants who want to share the experiences of their archive.

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!