Call for International Collaboration to Build Capacity for Safeguarding World’s Audiovisual Heritage
ICCROM’s SOIMA (Sound and Image Collections Conservation) programme was invited to participate in the International Audiovisual Archival Training Summit, organized by the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) at the Cinémathèque française in Paris, France on 8 March 2017. Aparna Tandon, ICCROM’s Project Manager for SOIMA, met with members of leading institutions in the audiovisual field to identify prospective partners for the SOIMA programme and to discover future collaborative capacity-building opportunities.
The audiovisual experts in attendance made plans to develop an overview of shared resources for audiovisual archives, define a set of common principles for cross-institutional collaboration, gather best practices for capacity building, and create a common scholarship fund for all institutions present.
This international meeting opened the door for discussion and collaboration amongst representatives of key institutions that provide international training for audiovisual preservation. By the end of the one-day symposium the attendees, including SOIMA representatives, had solidified partnerships for reaching out to greater number of institutions and professionals requiring training.
The general consensus at the summit was that without partnerships, the audiovisual preservation field would disappear due to ongoing financial and institutional constraints.
SOIMA’s expertise in capacity building has developed over the past decade. Its six previous workshops have cultivated an international committed network of audiovisual professionals that spans 109 institutions in more than sixty countries. In its next phase, SOIMA will continue to develop partnerships with diverse audiovisual archives and cultural institutions to create a more expansive network for using sound and image heritage for sustainable development and promotion of creative industries.
The major institutions that participated in the summit were: Association des Cinématèques Europeennes (ACE), Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), Cinématèque française, Cineteca di Bologna, Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Associations (CCAAA), Federation of Commercial Audiovisual Libraries (FOCAL International), Institut national de l’Audiovisuel (INA), International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA), International Council on Archives (ICA), International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF), International Federation of Television Archives (FIAT/IFTA), Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, New York University’s Audiovisual Preservation Exchange (APEX), South East Asia Pacific Audio Visual Archive Association (SEAPAVAA), United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization- Memory of the World (UNESCO MoW).