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.