AES Celebrates UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, Friday, October 27, 2017, with Conference Scholarship
To celebrate UNESCO’s World Day for Audiovisual Heritage (Friday, October 27, 2017), the Audio Engineering Society has established a scholarship to cover travel and registration costs to fund participation by an audio archivist from an emerging nation in the 2018 AES International Conference on Audio Archiving, Preservation and Restoration. The conference will take place June 28 to 30, 2018, at the United States Library of Congress’ National Audio Visual Conservation Center (NAVCC) in Culpeper, Virginia, USA.
“This event presents a remarkable opportunity to bring researchers and practitioners together for three days to discuss critical preservation issues and to focus on strategies that will support and encourage collaboration and interoperability between industry and the preservation, restoration and archiving communities,” said Conference Chair John Krivit. “To serve the mission of UNESCO’s World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, we want to make it possible for a deserving audio archivist to gain knowledge they can bring home to aid the preservation of the audio artifacts of a language and culture.”
With a theme of “Discover, Remember and Share,” UNESCO’s (United Nations Educational, Science and Cultural Organization) World Day for Audiovisual Heritage is a commemoration of the adoption, in 1980 by the 21st General Conference, of the Recommendation for the Safeguarding and Preservation of Moving Images. The vision for the event also encapsulates the motivation behind AES’s technical Conference on Audio Archiving, Preservation and Restoration. “Audiovisual archives tell us stories about people’s lives and cultures from all over the world,” states the event website. “They represent a priceless heritage which is an affirmation of our collective memory and a valuable source of knowledge since they reflect the cultural, social and linguistic diversity of our communities. They help us grow and comprehend the world we all share. Conserving this heritage and ensuring it remains accessible to the public and future generations is a vital goal for all memory institutions as well as the public at large.”
Topics for the AES’s Conference on Audio Archiving, Preservation and Restoration will include object-based preservation & material science, handling and storage of audio carriers, new developments in material research, preservation by digitization, mechanical vs. optical transfer, restoration of obsolete disc formats, preservation issues for emerging high-end audio formats, preserving legacy professional formats (including multitrack tapes and obsolete digital formats), storage and access technology, current status and future development of digital archives, metadata, aesthetic considerations in digital restoration of historical audio, public/private collaboration for preservation and access, and considerations for archiving in preserving commercial audio. The conference program will include a tour of the NAVCC.
For more information about the 2018 AES Conference on Audio Archiving, Conservation and Restoration, and the call for contributions, visit http://www.aes.org/conferences/2018/archiving/. Guidelines for applying for the scholarship will be posted at that site on November 1, 2017.
