We Are the World: AMIA Comes of Age and Discovers International Relations

One can easily overhype the “we are the world” bit because there are large parts of the globe in which activity in audiovisual archives is either marginal or nonexistent, and there are many countries in which there are archives with which the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) only has contact through other federations or associations of archives. However, AMIA has come a long way in the last five years in reaching out beyond North America to anyone, anywhere, with a sincere desire to collect and protect a piece of the world’s audiovisual heritage.

In a sense, AMIA has always been international. Once the Film Archives Advisory and Television Archives Advisory Committees (F/TAAC), from which AMIA emerged in 1991, had outgrown their original function of coordinating the activity on a national level and of advising the American Film Institute (AFI) on how to distribute the National Endowment for the Arts funding then available, they became effectively the body linking moving image archives in North America.

Canadian members were welcome. Certainly, when I shifted from managing the AFI’s archives program and began directing the audiovisual program at the Public Archives of Canada (now Library and Archives Canada) in 1973, I assumed I could continue sharing knowledge and experience with my American friends. There may have been one or two other Canadians attending FAAC in those early days (the records are nonexistent—we used to signify agreement with a nodding of heads!), but in due course of time, more than forty other Canadian archivists joined.

It should be clear from the history statement on the organization’s Web site that AMIA has always been an association open to moving image archivists from anywhere in the world.¹ They can work in national institutions with substantial budgets or in the equivalent of mom-and-pop storefront operations hanging on from day to day, hoping that some funding source will recognize the value of their work. Terminology tends to be imprecise in our field: you can’t restore or preserve unless you first protect, and if all you can do is protect, even in substandard storage conditions, you are still carrying out a vital archival function.

Public access is not an essential characteristic in defining moving image archives. AMIA is unique in that the membership includes archivists from production companies in film and television to distributors, footage libraries, and laboratories—anyone involved with protecting, restoring, and disseminating the heritage.

In AMIA’s first ten years, the membership grew steadily, until it leveled off at about seven hundred. While foreign membership (defined as residents outside North America) grew as well, developments in the moving image archives world elsewhere held the increase to modest numbers. One was the establishment of the Southeast Asia-Pacific Audiovisual Archive Association (SEAPAVAA) in 1996, which grouped moving image archives and individual archivists from the ten nations of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Australia and New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands into an association with a mandate very similar to that of AMIA. Another was the impact of digitization with converging recording technologies in sound and images, leading organizations such as the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA; originally the International Association of Sound Archives) to expand their mandates. A third factor was the significant increase in resources available for audiovisual archives throughout the European Union. Numerous collaborative and well-funded projects in preservation and data management in the past ten years have linked archives and archivists in Europe in ways that the rest of the world can only envy.

While all this activity was taking place, AMIA faced a dilemma. With the vast majority of its members located in the United States, there was resistance to holding the annual conference outside the United States because of cost and travel restrictions. This denied AMIA the opportunity to use conferences in other regions of the globe as a means of developing the field and of attracting new members. This has been the practice of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) and the International Federation of Television Archives...