New Online: Internet Archive Announces Availability of Afghan Media Resource Center (AMRC)/Images of Afghanistan 1987-1994 Collection

From an IA Blog Post:

Journalists and others risk their lives to keep the public informed in times of conflict. War imagery provides us with important information in the moment, and creates a trove of invaluable archival content for the future.
Please be aware that this collection contains some disturbing photos of violence and its aftermath.
The Afghan Media Resource Center (AMRC) was founded in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1987, by a team of media trainers working under contract to Boston University. The goal of the project was to assist Afghans to produce and distribute accurate and reliable accounts of the Afghan war to news agencies and television networks throughout the world. Beginning in the early 1980’s amidst a news blackout imposed by the Soviet backed Kabul government, foreign journalists had become targets to be captured or killed. The AMRC was an effort to overcome the substantial obstacles encountered by media representatives in bringing events surrounding the Afghan-Soviet war to world attention.
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In 2012 AMRC received a grant to digitize the entire AMRC archive, to preserve the collection at the U.S. Library of Congress. AMRC senior media advisors Stephen Olsson and Nick Mills were trained in the digitization processes by the Library of Congress, then spent two weeks in Kabul training the AMRC staff. The digitization and metadata sheets (in English, Dari and Pashto) were completed in 2016, and were welcomed into the Library of Congress with a formal ceremony. We are now making the entire AMRC collection available through our on-line partner, The Internet Archive.
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The AMRC collection spans a critical period in Afghanistan’s history – (1987 – 1994), including 76,000 photographs, 1,175 hours of video material, 356 hours of audio material, and many stories from print media.
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Now the entire collection is readily available to scholars, researchers and publishers. All royalties for commercial use of the photo images and video material will continue to support the non-profit work of the AMRC.

Learn More About the Collection, Read the Complete Blog Post
Direct to The Afghan Media Resource Center (AMRC)

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