Archives for the Future: Global Perspectives on Audiovisual Archives in the 21st Century (review)

Archives for the Future is an eye-opening book. In December 1999 a group of audiovisual archivists met in Manesar, India at a conference sponsored by the Ford Foundation. The intent was to bring together archivists from non-Western "industrializing" countries to discuss issues and possible solutions in audiovisual archives. Anthony Seeger and Shubha Chaudhuri, the conference's two organizers, edited the volume. Seeger, then head of Smithsonian Folkways, was the only representative from an American institution. The other conference organizer, Shubha Chaudhuri, is archivist at the Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE) of the American Institute of Indian Studies.

The conference departed from the standard academic format in favor of group discussion and problem solving. All the participants spoke English, and each was required to provide a brief position paper. Rather than presenting their papers formally, however, the participants made them available to each other ahead of time, and then engaged in discussions that eventually resulted in formal documents. The book is made up of two introductory sections: one on preservation and technology, focusing on a presentation by Dietrich Schuller, who represented the International Association of Audio and Audiovisual Archives (IASA), and a section on "Rights, Intellectual Property, and Archives Today." Both include questions and discussion. The remainder of the book consists of the original position papers of the participants, transcriptions of role-playing sessions in which they represented the attitudes of archivists, collectors, and administrators, and the final working documents. A bibliography current through 2001 and a list of Web sites for pertinent organizations conclude the volume. On the whole it presents an enlightening view of audiovisual archives in other parts of the world.

Americans tend to assume that we are automatically at the forefront of innovation and technology, but publications like this one reveal the fallacies in such assumptions. In his presentation on technology and preservation, Dietrich Schuller points out that in the past decade sound archives have undergone a paradigm change from focusing on preservation of the original recording to aiming for preservation of content. He urges archives to go digital at a time when American best practice was still wedded to reel-to-reel analog tape. Schuller's suggested solution, a tape-based digital mass storage system that resembles a jukebox, has been superseded by stand-alone servers with huge disk capacity, which are now available at relatively low cost. His recommendations to archivists to continue to raise awareness about audiovisual archives and their preservation goals, to train preservation specialists, to cooperate to preserve the audiovisual record, and to work for funding on all levels, cannot be timelier. Schuller's other point is that neither original recordings nor original hardware should be discarded—a concept that involves funding, training, and cooperation as well. The discussion following his presentation, as transcribed, follows up on technical points and covers everything from equipment for fieldwork to recommended storage conditions. This section of the book, now somewhat out-of-date, points out both the speed with which technology changes and the willingness of archivists in areas that might be considered marginalized to embrace it as they can.

In the section on rights and ethics one detects the guidance of Anthony Seeger, who has been a tireless advocate for ethical collecting and dissemination of indigenous music. A main point is that an archive's policies must be constantly reviewed and re-evaluated in the light of changing laws and changing demands. The emphasis is on the relationships between archives, the people who create the collections and donate them to archives, and the documented communities. The goal is to provide fair treatment to all parties, especially when archival recordings are used commercially.

Equally interesting, however, are the concepts like "moral right"—respect for the integrity of the material—not covered by...