Antipodean Reflections on AMIA

In browsing through back issues of the AMIA Newsletter, I came across, with some pleasure, issue 31 (Winter 1996), where I am not only listed as a new member and a participant at the Toronto conference (my first) but am also included in Greg Lukow’s compilation of “Publications Received and Noted” as follows:

Edmondson, Ray, and the members of AVAPIN. A Philosophy of Audiovisual (AV) Archiving: Draft Two. Audiovisual Archiving Philosophy Interest Network (AVAPIN), August 1995. 38 pages plus appendices. Prepared for discussion at the Toronto AMIA conference, October 1995, and the UNESCO Round Table on AV Archiving, March 1996.

The present successor to that document, the eighty-page Audiovisual Archiving: Philosophy and Principles, was published by UNESCO in 2004. Available, to date, in nine languages, it might be fairly said that it has become part of the furniture of our profession. Back in 1995, however, it was far from obvious that there was any need for a manual that delved into the values and philosophical fundamentals underlying our work. The Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) conference forum and the resulting discussion were instrumental in shaping the then embryonic text, and it has always seemed to me significant that AMIA found space for what may have seemed at the time a rather esoteric topic.

I think this says something about the style of AMIA conferences. Unlike other associations that take a disciplined, thematic approach to conference papers and symposia, AMIA offers unrestricted scope: it seeks (to quote the call for the 2010 conference) “papers, panels and posters on all issues to do with sound and audiovisual archives.” Nothing is off the table or under the radar, and invariably, the result is a rich and challenging, if sometimes unconventional, diet. The parallel streaming of sessions, which means that one is always conflicted for choice, reflects the real world in which AMIA members live.

That brings me to the nature of AMIA itself. My wife vividly recalls my coming home from the Toronto conference in 1995, enthused about AMIA. “I can talk to these people. They understand me,” she remembers me saying. Although I had known about AMIA for some time, it was the first time I had actually encountered it in the flesh. I have rarely missed a conference since, and I have never failed to be energized by the experience. It may be a function of the size of the gathering—it is easily the largest annual conference in the audiovisual archiving field—or the diversity of the participants, or the quality and range of the sessions. It might be that so much is compressed into an intensive four or five days.

But there is also an intangible quality to the event that derives from a specific source. I have always felt welcome. That does not mean faux camaraderie, nor does it mean organized mentoring, important as that is; it simply speaks to the character of the membership and the reason people join AMIA and come to the conference at all. We are there because we are engaged in a mission that matters, and anyone who shares that motivation is automatically welcome. We are energized and encouraged by each other.

AMIA’s great strength is that it is based on individual rather than corporate or institutional membership. It is inclusive rather than exclusive. Wherever its members sit in their respective organizational hierarchies, they participate in AMIA as individuals. This makes AMIA a great leveler. It encourages a democratic approach in its activities and its committees. It’s expressed in the liveliest Listserv in the profession. Potentially, it allows AMIA to take public stances on professional issues without fear or favor, and it is what appeals to people outside North America, for whom AMIA membership is a relatively expensive affair—particularly when the cost of conference attendance (always at a North American venue) is taken into account.

A case in point is the unique influence AMIA members had on the fortunes of Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA). Some readers will remember the long, troubled saga of the archive’s puzzling, if short-lived, name change (to ScreenSound Australia) in...