Philology in the preservation of audio documents: Customized versus ready-made approaches

Sound recordings have proven to be irreplaceable primary sources for disciplines like linguistics, musicology, ethnomusicology and sociology. Their fragile physical nature has activated a number of counter-actions aimed at prolonging the life expectancy of their content. Methodological issues have been raised in the past three decades, considering the relationship between the physical object and its (digitized) intangible content, which is …

Protecting heritage during a crisis: A case example from Syria

Heritage creates people’s memory as well as their existence. The Knooz Syria archive represents the history of the press and printing in Syria from the mid-nineteenth century up to the 1970s. When its founders began collecting materials, they did not predict the crisis that wrecked Syria beginning in 2011. Forced to flee Damascus, they left behind tens of thousands of …

The sonic heritage of ecosystems: Toward a formulation

This paper discusses the importance of the ‘paleo- soundscapes’ of remote natural habitats as unique footprints of the systemic behaviour of healthy ecosystems and proposes considering them as intangible heritage to be urgently recorded and preserved. The interdisciplinary project Fragments of Extinction has worked toward preserving that ecological heritage through multidimensional sound recording eldwork in primary equatorial rainforests since 2002. …

All you need is love: The preservation of photographic collections here, there and everywhere

Preservation of photographic materials, both physical and digital, presents numerous challenges, and photographic collections are at risk world-wide. In response to this danger, regional partners have worked with international organizations to forge global training initiatives and platforms centred on experiential learning and designed with curricula tailored to speci c climates, geographies, needs and outcomes. paper highlights three forward-thinking e orts. …

Open access: a challenging opportunity for audiovisual archives

In the broadest sense, archives are an embodiment of cultural artefacts that endure as signifiers of who we are and why. They are both a place of representation of these signifiers and their institutional form, providing tangible evidence of memory as well as defining memory institutionally within prevailing political systems and cultural norms. The principle of offering equal and open …

Challenges at the Europeana Space Project: Dance and the intersections between copyright and intangible cultural heritage

Digital technologies enable us to visualize dance in new ways and to capture recordings of dance which may be preserved and handed down to future generations. In this way, dance starts to become part of our intangible cultural heritage. But capturing dance also raises questions of authorship and ownership of copyright in both the dance and the recording of the …