Riga Conference 2014

Conference Announcement

Baltic Audiovisual Archival Council
Annual Conference 2014

"Safe and reusable: ideals versus real life"

The BAAC annual conference will be held from September 17 to 19 this year in Riga, Latvia, in the National Library of Latvia, also called „The Castle of Light” - an impressive sight and one of the largest new cultural buildings in the Northern Hemisphere in the 21st century. The conference will be hosted by the National Library of Latvia, in cooperation with the Archives of Latvian Folklore, Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art, University of Latvia, the National Archives of Latvia and Museum of the Occupation of Latvia.

Any archive is first and foremost an institution aimed at preservation, safeguarding the holdings entrusted to it. At the same time the material is kept safe for a purpose – that purpose being the accessibility of the material now and in the future.

Though digitisation has been chosen as the solution for both preservation and facilitation of access, the analogue originals should not be discarded, but must be kept as safe as possible, maintaining their technical readability – in order to both counteract some data errors of the digitised material, and to make use of some new and better digitising technologies.

It would be interesting and useful to share experiences – both good and not so successful – in the fields of preservation and access. The following topics are offered as starting points:
• preservation methods for the analogue material;
• best formats for digitising, as well as digital short and long time storage;
• provision of access to the material – either analogue or digital;
• dealing with born digital material;
• view of the user compared to that of the archivist.
The conference language will be English.

Programme committee:

Aldis Pūtelis (Archives of Latvian Folklore, Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art, University of Latvia)
Zane Grosa (National Library of Latvia)
Janika Oras (Estonian Literary Museum)
Jole Stimbiryte (Lithuanian Central State Archive)

Conference organisers:

Zane Grosa
Aldis Pūtelis
Lelde Neimane (Museum of the Occupation of Latvia)
Marina Gevorgjana (National Archives of Latvia)