What to do with audiovisual carriers after their digitization? Proposal for a five-step decision making framework

Both traditional and more recent audiovisual carriers degrade. Even CD-ROMs have typically only a ten-year expected life span. In addition, playback equipment for both analogue and digital carriers will ultimately grow scarcer and more expensive to repair or replace. Archives and museums are inevitably faced with the decision of whether to preserve audiovisual carriers after their content has been digitized. …

I value, you value, we value… but what’s the value? Value assessment as a tool to manage sound and image collections

Today‚ audiovisual collections account for a large portion of the world’s memory. They are part of museums, serve as research documents for various types of scientific institution, register history and provide us with a tangible witness of our most precious memories. Even though sound and image collections are generally accepted as being part of our cultural heritage, determining how to …

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. …

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 …