Preserving and Digitising our Audio-visual Heritage

Every year the United Nations recognises the importance of preservation with World Day for Audiovisual Heritage. 

The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Studies (AIATSIS), is engaging in the preservation of Indigenous Australian cultural items. They are currently working on digitising film from the 1970s of an item titled "The Chart". These are recordings of men of the Bani family, of the Torres Strait Islands, transmitting knowledge via dance and song that is best documented through film. The men sum up the knowledge as being about the weather, tides and astronomical interaction, cloud shape and interpretation for weather, marine biology, historical and theological points.

AIATSIS points to research indicating that in the next ten years, older formats such as video will become too expensive to source playback devices for such treasures to be viewed. Items like the above will be made inaccessible and deteriorate further eventually being lost, if not preserved in modern digital formats.

At JCU our Library and Information Services Special Collections team is also involved in digitisation of photos and books, as well as converting audiovisual material to new formats. Some of this work can be found in NQHeritage@JCU.


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