RT Archives & DRI to co-host International Archiving conference

RT Archives & DRI to co-host International Archiving conference

18 May 2016: RT Archives and the Digital Repository of Ireland to co-host international conference Archiving Tomorrow 2016 addressing the risks facing audiovisual archive collections around the world

RT Archives and the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) today announced that they will co-host the two day international conference Archiving Tomorrow 2016', taking place at the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, from 1st to 3rd June 2016. With the theme Archives at Risk', the conference will bring speakers and delegates from the world's leading audiovisual archiving institutions together with international and national cultural heritage bodies to raise awareness of the risks and issues faced in saving the world's audiovisual heritage, embodied in film, television and sound recordings. Innovative solutions and funding models to safeguard archive collections worldwide will be a key focus of the conference.

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 audiovisual heritage of the twentieth century across film, television and sound recordings. We need to also ask what will survive 100 years from now? said Br d Dooley, Head of RT Archives and Chair of the International Save Your Archive' programme, announcing the upcoming Archiving Tomorrow 2016 conference.

Sue Malden, Chair of FOCAL International (the association for the commercial film and video library archive industry) and co-organiser of the conference, said; Much of the world's audiovisual archives remain on decaying carriers and require urgent intervention if they are to survive into the current millennium. With a finite window of time of perhaps ten to fifteen 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 twentieth century.

We are very pleased to support this timely conference, as it demonstrates the ongoing and urgent importance of providing robust solutions for the long-term preservation of fragile objects, said Dr. Natalie Harrower, Director of the Digital Repository of Ireland, which is headquartered at the Royal Irish Academy. These solutions may vary across media and formats, but their purpose remains the same: to preserve and continue to enjoy our cherished cultural heritage into the long future.

Speakers at the conference include; Lord David Puttnam who will address the threats to audiovisual historical records, Richard Ranft of the British Library speaking on the British Library's endangered archives programme, Dominique Saintville of UNESCO's Memory of the World' programme and Sue Malden, formally Head of the BBC Information and Archives and now Chair of FOCAL International, who will discuss the Archives@Risk Project, a global initiative to safeguard endangered audiovisual archives.

Archiving Tomorrow 2016 is organised in association with RT Archives and the Digital Repository of Ireland, with a number of key local and worldwide partner associations, including: the information network organisation KES International, the Federation of Commercial Audiovisual Libraries (FOCAL International), the International Federation of Television Archives (FIAT/ IFTA), and the Coordinating Council for Audiovisual Archive Associations (CCAAA).

The conference is also supported by ARKHADIS (France), the Broadcast Authority of Ireland (BAI), the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA) and Memnon (a Sony company).

For more information, visit http://www.archivingtomorrow.com/

ENDS

For reference, please contact: Marika MacCarvill, Communications Manager, RT Digital

Tel: 01-2084665 / marika.maccarvill@rte.ie

Notes to Editor:

About RT Archives

RT Archives is responsible for collecting, preserving and making accessible the creative and documentary output of the national broadcaster.

Consisting of Ireland's largest audio visual collection, containing hundreds of thousands of hours of moving image and sound recordings together with significant collections of photographs, manuscripts and administrative documents, RT Archives maintains and preserves a unique record of Irish life in the interest of the Irish public.

In addition to providing content for radio and television programmes across all RT platforms and services (on average 27% of weekly RT News programming is made up of archive content), RT Archives also publishes a wide range of curated archive content on a daily basis on its website http://www.rte.ie/archives which attracted 1.3 million visitors in the past 12 months. The recent 1916 They Were There' archive exhibitions and interactive map of locations and witness accounts attracted significant visitors worldwide.

LINK:	http://www.rte.ie/about/en/press-office/press-releases/2016/0520/78980...
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