UN Spotlights Digitization of Audiovisual Archives to Preserve Human History on World Day for Audiovisual Heritage

From the UN News:

On Sunday, marking the annual World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, the United Nations recognized the hard work of thousands of preservation experts, from librarians to archivists and caretakers, whose knowledge and devotion is helping ensure the world does not lose valuable history written on film, and in radio and television.

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The theme of this year’s World Day, “Engage the Past Through Sound and Images” praises the expertise of the people working to safeguard collections of the past for generations to come, which without, “large portions of our cultural heritage would disappear to be lost forever”, the UN said on the Day.

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UNESCO in 2015 launched a fundraising project to create digital surrogates of the Organisation’s archives dating back to its predecessors, including the League of Nations’ International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation.

The institutional archives and historical audiovisual collections contain evidence of more than 70 years of ideas and actions for peace and international understanding that span the Organization’s wide-ranging fields of competence.

Three years on, the Organisation’s Paris headquarters began housing a digitization lab for material to be more efficiently sorted, digitized, quality checked, and made available online.

A wealth of 5,000 photos, 8,000 hours of sound recordings, 45 hours of film, and 560,000 pages of governing body documents capture oceanography, space exploration, human rights communications, and traces of intellectual figures such as Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Masaharu Anesaki and more.

Click here to experience the online library thus far.

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See Also: Engage the Past Through Sound and Images

See Also: World Day for Audiovisual Heritage 27 October

See Also: UNESCO Digital Archives

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Digital Collections, Digital Preservation, Libraries, News, Preservation