Abbreviation | IASA |
---|---|
Formation | 1969 |
Purpose | Professional Body |
Region served | Worldwide |
Membership | 420 |
Official language | English, French, German, Spanish |
President | Tre Berney |
Affiliations | Co-ordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Associations |
Website | Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives |
The International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) was established in 1969 to serve as a forum for international co-operation between archives, libraries, and individuals interested in the preservation of recorded sound and audiovisual documents. [1] [2] [3]
The IASA constitution [4] states the following purposes:
IASA has members from more than 70 countries representing a broad palette of audiovisual archives and personal interests which are distinguished by their focus on particular subjects and areas, for example: archives for all sorts of musical recordings, historic, literary, folkloric and ethnological sound documents, theatre productions and oral history interviews, bio-acoustics, environmental and medical sounds, linguistic and dialect recordings, as well as recordings for forensic purposes.
IASA promotes the open and ongoing exchange of ideas and information on current issues in the audiovisual field via annual conferences, an IASA Journal, email list and the IASA web site.
IASA has held a conference each year since its inception, sometimes in partnership with related organisations. [5] In 2010, IASA and the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) came together for the first time in a joint IASA-AMIA conference held in Philadelphia, USA. With more than 750 participants and more than 100 presentations and lectures this was one of the biggest conferences in the audiovisual archiving field ever. The 2013 conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, was held in association with the Baltic Audiovisual Archival Council. The 2019 conference was held in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
IASA follows closely the progress of technology and members can call upon a pool of expertise for help and advice on various aspects, ranging from digitisation to metadata to technical issues. In this regard, IASA has published a number of special publications: [28]
The organisation issues awards for outstanding contributions to the profession of sound and audiovisual archiving, as well as financial support for research, for training, and for participating in annual conferences:
IASA has long standing relationships with international organisations such as UNESCO and Europeana and is a respected partner in various international audiovisual archive projects. IASA is a founding member of the CCAAA (Co-ordinating Council of Audiovisual Archive Associations).
In 2012 and 2013, IASA hosted the official website of the UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, an event held annually on 27 October to raise awareness of the significance of and threats to sound and moving image heritage worldwide.
Term of office from 2020 to 2023: [29]
Source: [30]
IASA Committees focus on topics that are of common interest to all archives and collections. IASA Sections provide a platform for the exchange of information between specific types of archives and collections.
The Organising Knowledge Committee concerns itself with standards and rules as well as with systems, automated or manual, for the documentation and cataloguing of audiovisual media. Officers (chairpersons, secretaries) of the Organising Knowledge Committee (previously known as the Cataloguing and Documentation Committee) are elected within the committee. The committees exclusively decide on the objects and tasks they deal with. [31]
The Discography Committee deals with standards and recommended practices, as well as current and ongoing projects involving published recordings. Officers of the Discography Committee (chairpersons, secretaries) are elected within the committee. The committees exclusively decide on the objects and tasks they deal with. [32]
The Technical Committee devotes itself to all technical aspects of sound and audiovisual recordings. This includes the actual recording processes, optimisation of reproduction of historical and modern recordings, transfer and digitisation technologies, standards and storage technologies, software and carriers. The Technical Committee is concerned with the preservation of sound and audiovisual media and technically sustainable approaches to future access. The creation of special publications enabling the AV archive community to take educated decisions regarding this, is a main concern of the committee. The Technical Committee has delivered several papers, which serve as technical guidelines, in the series Standards, Recommended Practices and Strategies. Officers of the Technical Committee (chairpersons, secretaries) are elected within the committee. The committees exclusively decide on the objects and tasks they deal with. [33]
The Training & Education Committee seeks to create and support an Audiovisual archival community who are knowledgeable, professional, capable of caring for their collections effectively, and acknowledged as such by their institutions or wider professional community. Officers of the Training & Education Committee (chairpersons, secretaries) are elected within the committee. The committees exclusively decide on the objects and tasks they deal with. The Training and Education Committee concerns itself with audiovisual archiving Training & Education, as well as concentrated actions in gaining multifunctional training and education material. [34]
The National Archives Section is where members meet to consider issues facing officially designated national collections, e.g. acquisition policies, legal deposit, the management of large collections, whether held in archives, museums, libraries, dedicated audiovisual organisations or research institutes and universities. [35]
The Broadcast Archives Section handles the special responsibilities of audiovisual archives in broadcast companies. [36]
The Europeana Sounds Task Force works on the following activities: [37]
National and regional branches of IASA, with their own membership and activities, exist for Austria, Britain and Ireland and German-Swissgerman regions. [38]
The American Library Association (ALA) is a nonprofit organization based in the United States that promotes libraries and library education internationally. It is the oldest and largest library association in the world.
Hans Axel Valdemar Corell is a Swedish lawyer and diplomat. Between March 1994 and March 2004 he was Under-Secretary-General for Legal Affairs and the Legal Counsel of the United Nations. In this capacity, he was head of the Office of Legal Affairs in the United Nations Secretariat.
The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) is a committee of banking supervisory authorities that was established by the central bank governors of the Group of Ten (G10) countries in 1974. The committee expanded its membership in 2009 and then again in 2014. As of 2019, the BCBS has 45 members from 28 jurisdictions, consisting of central banks and authorities with responsibility of banking regulation.
Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) is a nonprofit international learned society whose work focuses on game studies and associated activities. DiGRA was formally established in 2003 in Finland. It is a leading academic organization in the field of digital games.
The British Library Sound Archive, formerly the British Institute of Recorded Sound; also known as the National Sound Archive (NSA), in London, England is among the largest collections of recorded sound in the world, including music, spoken word and ambient recordings. It holds more than six million recordings, including over a million discs and 200,000 tapes. These include commercial record releases, radio broadcasts, and privately made recordings.
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA), known as ScreenSound Australia from 1999 to 2004, is Australia's audiovisual archive, responsible for developing, preserving, maintaining, promoting and providing access to a national collection of film, television, sound, radio, video games, new media, and related documents and artefacts. The collection ranges from works created in the late nineteenth century when the recorded sound and film industries were in their infancy, to those made in the present day.
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision is an archive that was launched on 31 July 2014, following the completion of a three-year process whereby the New Zealand Film Archive "absorbed" the collections and operations of the RNZ Sound Archives Ngā Taonga Kōrero in 2012 and the Television New Zealand Archive in 2014.
Finnish Music Information Centre (Fimic) was an organization dedicated to the promotion and archiving of Finnish music. A member of the International Association of Music Information Centres (IAMIC), the International Association of Music Libraries (IAML) and the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA), Fimic hosts a vast library of scores, parts, and recordings, and distributes unpublished sheet music. The organization covers nearly all genres of Finnish music, ranging from contemporary classical compositions to rock and folk music.
The conservation and restoration of vinyl discs refers to the preventive measures taken to defend against damage and slow degradation, and to maintain fidelity of singles, 12" singles, EP’s, and LP’s in 45 or 33⅓ rpm 10" disc recordings.
The Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and study of sound recordings. Established in 1966, members include record collectors, discographers, and audio engineers, together with librarians, curators, archivists, and researchers.
Europeana is a web portal created by the European Union containing digitised cultural heritage collections of more than 3,000 institutions across Europe. It includes records of over 50 million cultural and scientific artefacts, brought together on a single platform and presented in a variety of ways relevant to modern users. The prototype for Europeana was the European Digital Library Network (EDLnet), launched in 2008.
The Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization established to advance the field of moving image archiving by fostering cooperation among individuals and organizations concerned with the acquisition, description, preservation, exhibition and use of moving image materials.
Pandit Suman Ghosh is a Hindustani Classical Vocalist of the Mewati Gharana of Hindustani Classical Music. He is the founder and President of the Center for Indian Classical Music of Houston (CICMH).
EUscreen is a website that provides free access to Europe's television heritage through videos, articles, images and audio from European audiovisual archives and broadcasters. Its digitised content covers a period from early 1900 until today. EUscreen "aligns the heterogeneous collections held throughout Europe and encourages the exploration of Europe's cultural and television history by different user groups". EUscreen is also the name of the overarching network of institutions working on providing access European audiovisual collections.
The World Day for Audiovisual Heritage takes place every 27 October. This commemorative day was chosen by UNESCO in 2005 to raise awareness of the significance and preservation risks of recorded sound and audiovisual documents. Events are held in many countries, organised by national and regional sound and film archives, broadcasters, museums and libraries, and major audiovisual associations including the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), International Council on Archives (ICA), International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA), and the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF)).
The Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Associations (CCAAA) is an umbrella group of international private organizations working on audiovisual archiving. These professional organizations have a common goal of promoting and encouraging the preservation and the accessibility of the world's audiovisual heritage. The CCAAA member organisations work with many AV materials including: films, TV, radio, photographs and audio recordings.
The Österreichische Mediathek is the Austrian archive for sound recordings and videos on cultural and contemporary history. It was founded in 1960 as Österreichische Phonothek by the Ministry of Education and has been a branch of the Technisches Museum Wien since 2001. As video and sound archive, the Österreichische Mediathek is responsible for the preservation of the Austrian audio-visual cultural heritage.
Online Audiovisual Catalogers, Inc., otherwise known as OLAC, was founded in 1980 as a group of library catalogers involved in the cataloging of audiovisual materials, but now supports the work of catalogers working on all nonprint resources. OLAC provides a way for catalogers to have a method of communication among themselves as well as with the Library of Congress. The first official meeting of the group happened on July 1, 1980, in New York City with Nancy B. Olson chairing the group of catalogers.
VisualAudio is a project that retrieves sound from a picture of a phonograph record. It originated from a partnership between the Swiss National Sound Archives and the School of Engineering and Architecture of Fribourg.
The Swiss National Sound Archives are the sound archives of Switzerland, based in Lugano. Its mission is to collect sound recordings related to the history and culture of Switzerland, to make them accessible and to make them available for use. In terms of audio recordings, it thus fulfils a similar function to the Swiss National Library in the field of literature. Since 2016, the National Sound Archives have been an organisational part of the Swiss National Library. The collection has more than 500,000 audio carriers and 20-25,000 audio documents are added each year.