The challenge of preserving the world's film, television and sound recordings will be discussed at a major international conference in Dublin in early June, RTÉ has announced. Speakers and delegates from the world's foremost audio-visual archives will join representatives from international cultural heritage bodies for the two-day international conference, Archiving Tomorrow 2016, co-hosted by RTÉ Archives and the Digital Repository of Ireland.
Speakers will include Oscar-winning film producer David Puttnam, Richard Ranft of the British Library and Dominique Saintville of Unesco's Memory of the World programme. Sue Malden, former head of the BBC's information and archives department and now head of the Federation of Commercial Audio-visual Libraries (Focal), will discuss the Archives@Risk project, a global initiative to safeguard endangered audio-visual archives
“Much of the world’s audio-visual archives remain on decaying carriers and require urgent intervention if they are to survive into the current millennium,” said Ms Maldon. “With a finite window of time of perhaps 10-15 years remaining to achieve this, the conference provides an important platform to debate the issues, exchange ideas and identify solutions for funding the future of these essential records of the 20th century.”
Cultural heritage
RTÉ’s head of archives, Bríd Dooley, who chairs the international Save Your Archive programme, said: “With history and heritage taking centre stage in Ireland this year as we commemorate the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising, it is fitting that Ireland should host this conference which puts cultural heritage in sharp focus and discusses the threats and opportunities to save the endangered audio-visual heritage of the twentieth century across film, television and sound recordings. We need to also ask what will survive 100 years from now?”
The conference takes place at the Royal Irish Academy from June 1st to 3rd.
