International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) Journal

President's Letter

Tre Berney — 2022-08-18

From “Sound” to “Sound and Audiovisual”

Kurt Deggeller — 2022-08-18

IASA emerged in 1969 from IAML, the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres. The interests of IAML’s members largely focused on music as manuscript or score, and musical sound recordings were dealt with in the Record Library Committee. IASA was founded to consider additional types of sound recordings, including research and oral history. From the frst years of IASA’s existence, the question of the organisation’s relationship to the moving image arose, represented by the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF). But as early as 1979, a delegate from the United States also brought video into play. With independence from IAML in the late 1980s, an intensive discussion began about the future of IASA and the expansion of the scope of the association to include audiovisual documents. Finally in 1999, the constitution and the name of the association were adapted. The transformation process triggered by this name change is still underway today. It could prove to be an advantage for IASA because it opens possibilities of adaptation to the rapidly changing world of audiovisual production due to digitisation and online media.

Replicating Digital Audiovisual Archives in the Cloud

Joe Stolarick — 2022-08-18

Non-alphanumeric characters in filenames and filepaths can lead to unintended consequences in digital preservation. The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation Archive conducted simple tests to investigate peculiarities related to this issue that surfaced when preserving their audiovisual assets. This case study resulted in a list of problematic, albeit commonly used, non-alphanumeric characters. It also uncovered significant implications for using proprietary cloud replication software as part of digital preservation workflows.

Voices from the War

Sarah Johnston — 2022-08-18

In August 1940, three New Zealand radio broadcasters set sail on an army troop ship from Wellington. They were bound for Egypt, where the New Zealand armed forces were part of the British Empire’s push to drive the German and Italian armies out of North Africa and the Middle East. With them was a mobile recording van, equipped to capture on lacquer discs the voices and sounds of New Zealanders at war, and send those re-
cordings back home for radio broadcasts on the other side of the world.

For the next five years, the Mobile Broadcasting Unit recorded interviews and reports about the fighting and the day-to-day business of war, as well as thousands of simple messages home from servicemen, and a few women. Today, the 1600 surviving Mobile Unit discs form part of the sound archives of Radio New Zealand, held by audiovisual archive Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision.

In this article the author will outline the history of the Mobile Units and the context in which they worked. She will also describe on-going work to identify the speakers heard in their recordings and make this collection more discoverable and accessible to researchers. Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision is currently digitising the collection and preservation archivist Sandy Ditchburn will describe some of the challenges she has encoun-
tered in capturing sound from the 80-year-old lacquer discs.

Preserving New Zealand's Voices of World War II

Sandy Ditchburn — 2022-08-18

During World War II, the Mobile Broadcasting Unit of New Zealand's armed forces recorded interviews and reports about the fighting and the day-to-day business of war, as well as thousands of simple messages home from servicemen, and a few women. Today, the 1600 surviving Mobile Unit discs form part of the sound archives of Radio New Zealand, held by audiovisual archive Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision. In this "sidebar" article which is a companion piece to "Voices from the War," the author describes some of the challenges she has encountered in capturing sound from the 80-year-old lacquer discs in the Mobile Broadcasting Unit collection.