Archipanion on the move
Felix Rauh, Frank Linnenbach und Irene Amstutz
UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage
Ever heard of it? Until last week, I hadn't either, it's annually on October 27th.
"This World Day is intended to raise awareness that humanity has created a large audiovisual heritage of sound recordings, films, and videos over the past 100 years or so that needs to be preserved as historical documents." (Source: Wikipedia)
The night before, I attended the thematic evening of the Swiss Economic Archive with a focus on industrial films, "Productions for Propaganda, Products, and Professions: Views on Swiss Industrial Films".
I learned that industrial films are very specialized films. They illustrate production processes, tell about product launches, train employees, capture company events, advertise products, and influence the image of a company. And from my point of view, they also reflect a certain zeitgeist in fashion, design, and cinematic expression. Very exciting explanations and explanations from Irene Amstutz and Felix Rauh based on selected film sequences from the 1940s and 1970s.
On the World Day itself, I made a "visit to the SRF archive". The "Research and Archives SRF" department presented its film and video archive in an online event. I learned what is in the inventory of the SRF archive, what the content and technical challenges are, and what the opening of the archive to the general public looks like. An exciting look behind the scenes by Manuel Meyer, Martin Blumenstein, Diana Micelli, and Vanessa Sautter Freudrich.
For me, the central aspect is the challenge of making this cultural heritage easily accessible. Above all, to make it effectively searchable.
Which strongly reminded me of our project for the Swiss Federal Archives, in which we made 14,500 federal council protocols from the years 1848 to 1963 searchable online using text recognition and machine learning.
This will probably continue to be a challenge in the future. Although the use of different technologies can be very helpful in this regard.
Thank you for the exciting exchange at the thematic evening: Irene Amstutz, Roman Wild, Elias Kreyenbuehl, Felix Rauh
Link to the project of the Federal Council protocols:
https://www.chgov.bar.admin.ch/
Let us together enable this findability and searchability!
