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!

DAS offers in-depth, real world information about managing and preserving your meda content though a unique case-study approach.

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 title of the symposium is "The Visible Archive: Archiving, processing, digitizing,restoring and sharing non-feature film collections".

Registrations are open until 10 April 2022.

ARSC's 56th Annual Conference and Pre-Conference Workshop will be hosted virtually, 17-21 May 2022!

The virtual conference will include live presentations in an online conference platform and recorded presentations made available for on-demand viewing in ARSC's Aviary Site.

The Program Committee has selected Detroit, Michigan as our virtual host city and welcomes proposals for presentations, panels, and posters on any aspect of sound recording, especially those relating to Detroit and the Midwest region of the United States.

Since the online platform also offers opportunities for global participation, we invite sound recording scholars, collectors, preservationists, and creators to engage in a broad range of topics that cross geographic, cultural, and collection boundaries.

Preliminary Conference Program [pdf]

Conference website: https://www.arsc-audio.org/conference.html

Implementation of automation tools based on machine learning and artificial intelligence, what future does AI hold for audiovisual librarians, what role can they play and how to manage such a big change? In 2015, to deal with the challenges raised by the massification of digital data, INA has embarked on a vast project to completely overhaul its information systems.

Embracing a data centric strategy, this overhaul meets the necessary conditions for the implementation of automation tools based on machine learning and artificial intelligence to segment and describe audiovisual content. After identifying a few use cases, the works to automate segmentation and indexing media process was launch in 2019. These technical and material issues come with human and professional challenges, asking for specific business user’s skills and knowledges.

This presentation aims to give a few answers, at least advices and feedbacks, to a simple question: what future does AI hold for audiovisual librarians, what role can they play and how to manage such a big change?

Regional Languages with Machine Learning: Achievements and Challenges (small languages and dialects). Radiotelevisiun Svizra Rumantscha (RTR, SRG SSR) has launched a project for the written reproduction of spoken Romansh: The Romansh media company Radiotelevisiun Svizra Rumantscha (RTR, SRG SSR) has launched a project for the written reproduction of spoken Romansh. In order to be able to teach Romansh to the computer at all, RTR first had to acquire data to feed the system to learn Romansh. Bernard Bearth, Head of Data and Archives at RTR, explains the value of the existing archives for this project and the importance of speech to text and automatic translation for RTR archives in the future.

Regional Languages with Machine Learning: Achievements and Challenges University of Edinburgh : Gaelic Speech Recognition: Challenges Faced, Lessons Learnt and Future Plans: In this seminar, Dr Will Lamb (University of Edinburgh) will discuss work towards an accurate, general purpose Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system for Scottish Gaelic. In 2021, a team of researchers at Edinburgh developed the first working example of such as system, with assistance from MG Alba and several other non-academic partners. By the end of the project, the system achieved an accuracy level of approximately 73%. While this is a far cry from state-of-the-art English systems, used in applications such as Siri and Alexa, it is a promising beginning and confirms the methodology adopted. Modern ASR systems are machine-learning based, and trained upon tens of thousands, if not millions, of hours of audio and corresponding text. The principal challenge facing minority languages, such as Gaelic, is acquiring suitable training data. In this seminar, Dr Lamb will outline plans to augment the current 103 hours of data fiftyfold (i.e. to 5000 hours). This increase would translate to a much more accurate and robust system. The goal is to develop a subtitling system appropriate for broadcasting purposes in the next 3 to 4 years.

Metadata wrangling at VRT wtih Tinkerlist: Managing metadata during TV production can be a very tedious and repetitive task — from manually uploading clips and adding numerous details (like names of the producers, creation dates, file types, etc.) to archiving them and hoping that one day you’ll be able to easily search and retrieve those clips.

Luckily, this no longer has to be the case. With TinkerList, production teams at broadcasting companies like VRT can automatically save and store metadata by simply uploading clips when they create scripts and rundowns, and entering the required details just once. The rest is archived and ready to retrieve in TinkerList’s database.

How exactly does it work and what else can TinkerList turn from ‘annoying’ to ‘automated’? Find out on the 26th of May during our talk with Erik Hauters and Aaron Nuytemans from TinkerList!

Cloud-based media supply chains: integration and evolution: The cloud has continued to rapidly evolve to support media workflows, including the distribution and monetization of content archives. This presentation will cover some recent updates to major cloud-based services relevant for media workflows since the last MMC Seminar in 2019, as well as some high-level strategy for turning archival focused media workflows into active media supply chains to support content reuse.

The Archvisit: The Impact of of AI /Machine Learning and the Pandemic on their Role: A wrap up and discussion focusing on if we can see a change of the archivist role in the context of AI /Machine Learning and the Pandemic. The discussion starts with an introduced from the perspectives that MMC has predicted and presented at the MMC Seminar in Stockholm 2019.

The FOCAL International Awards, which are heading into their 19th year, celebrates the achievements in the use of footage across a variety of genres and media platforms. The Awards also recognise the exceptional work of the archive researchers, archive producers and the accomplishments in the restoration work of film and television. 

Submissions for the FOCAL Awards 2022 Production, Jane Mercer Researcher of the Year and Restoration & Preservation Categories are now openis now open.

Enter now: entry.focalintawards.org

With the pandemic causing the FOCAL Awards to be hosted and streamed virtually over the last two years, we are delighted to announce that the FOCAL International Awards 2022 will be a live event in London, further details will be available shortly. 

It has been a fervent hope of everyone that we would be able to meet in person in 2022. However, with the continued development of the pandemic situation, bringing with it evolving travel restrictions and differing quarantine protocols, the SEAPAVAA concluded that it is prudent and realistic for SEAPAVAA’s 26th Conference to be held virtually from 19 – 21 July 2022.

The 2022 SEAPAVAA Conference was scheduled to be held in the Pacific. As such, the virtual conference will have a special focus on issues and challenges faced by Pacific members. Specific details relating to the virtual conference will be shared in early 2022.
SEAPAVAA’s 26th General Assembly (GA) will be held electronically from 2 – 31 May 2022. The details will be available on the website in due course.

We also invite you to check out SEAPAVAA’s YouTube Channel where you can access recordings of the virtual 25th Conference sessions. Recordings of future conferences will be uploaded on the SEAPAVAA YouTube Channel for greater accessibility.
We hope to see SEAPAVAA members and colleagues at next year’s virtual Conference and look forward to your participation in the e-GA.

The Executive Board is happy to announce the 2022 conference will be held at the National Phonotheque of Mexico and the Institute for Research in Librarianship and Information (IIBI) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM),  26-29 September. 

In line with the theme for 2022, attendees will be able to participate in significant portions of the conference remotely to provide access to those who are not able to attend in person. We are hopeful that the pandemic will subside sufficiently to allow a safe in-person conference, though changes to the conference format might be unavoidable if the epidemiological situation does not improve. More details to come as we gather them.

The title of this year’s FIAT/IFTA conference is “Archive out of the box!”. We welcome proposals based on user experiences, new initiatives or perspectives, striking conclusions, successes but also failures. The main objective is for audiovisual archive professionals to share among each other to understand the lessons learned and new challenges or solutions arising from entering into new partnerships, launching new ideas, wherever your archive is on the timeline. Suggestions for subjects not mentioned are equally welcome but should be contextualised thoroughly.

This is why the 2022 FIAT/IFTA World Conference programme features the following chapters:

The archive: an active member of society
Catering to the basics
Influencers of technological innovation
What makes you special

This workshop will include a discussion on mental health and the challenges faced by the archive industry when working with graphic and disturbing content. With the advance of True Crime series, this panel will introduce resources for a better protection and support of production crews and freelancers.

Tickets are available to book at: https://focalint.org/news-and-events/events/focals-online-workshop-working-with-sensitive-content

This year the Jane Mercer Memorial Lecture will be celebrating the World Day for Audiovisual Heritage and we are proud to announce that Stanley Nelson will be giving the lecture alongside Rosemary Rotondi. Stanley Nelson is the director of the Award-Winning documentary 'Attica', in which Rosemary Rotondi also worked on as the Archive Producer. 

During this lecture, Stanley Nelson and Rosemary Rotondi will speak abut their experience when working on documentaries and David Seevers will moderate a Q&A session.

Tickets are available to book through at: https://focalint.org/news-and-events/events/the-jane-mercer-memorial-lecture-in-conversation-with-stanley-nelson

We’re getting the band back together!

AMIA 2022 will be an in-person conference December 7-9, in Pittsburgh, PA!

The conference will start on Wednesday morning, ending on Friday evening (instead of Wednesday evening to Saturday afternoon) our plan is to make a portion of the conference available via livestream.

The room rate at the Omni William Penn will be $159 per night and the reservation system will be available soon. We ask that you stay at the Hotel during the conference if you possibly can. AMIA’s contract with the hotel requires that our room block be used or we are responsible for paying that amount of money to the hotel.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, AMIA is both cautiously optimistic and prepared to manage the conference with the health, safety, and well-being of our attendees, staff, presenters, exhibitors, sponsors, and speakers in mind.

We will continue to assess the risks in the area local to the conference and the current status in the United States.  The AMIA webpage, social media, and email communications will be employed to provide updates as the conference date draws near.

Tickets to attend FOCAL Members' Day and the annual Christmas Winter Party are now available to purchase.

With expert panel sessions, plenty of networking opportunities and exciting raffle prizes, this is not a day to miss!

Further details: https://focalint.org/news-and-events/events/focal-members-day-and-winter-party