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SEAPAVAA Newsletter |
Editorial
Elsewhere in this issue you will read about the proceedings of the Hanoi Conference, wherein SEAPAVAA adopted its first policy statement - on access - and at which we further grew, in size and depth, as a professional family. As our shared projects - such as the regional database and the film history publication - grow, we will see some of these stances begin to take effect. Recently I had the pleasure of serving as a faculty member at this year's FIAF Summer School held in Rochester, USA, where two skilled professionals. This stance has always been part of the rationale of SEAPAVAA as a professional forum for individuals as well as for institutions, and we are in tune with this emerging global view. In Hanoi, we discussed the prospects of the 2000 SEAPAVAA conference in Singapore - we proposed to meet in tandem with the annual gathering of IASA. Again, the global spotlight will be on us from a different angle. All this augurs well for our determination SEAPAVAA member institutions: Hwai Fey Wong from the National Archives of Singapore and Janine Walkom from the National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra participated. Participants were a diverse international grouping, and the School had input from both international specialists and the leaders of all the main film and television archives in the USA. Many issues about the present and future of audiovisual archiving were aired in this unique occasion. Two things became apparent to me. First was that there is a growing interest in our region from audiovisual archivists who live and work outside it. It was an opportunity to speak about SEAPAVAA and to answer questions about it. Clearly, the Association is now firmly on the international map. Second, there is the evident conviction that the time has come to gain formal international recognition for audiovisual archiving as a distinct profession, and therefore of its practitioners as in Hanoi to make our collections and our institutions visible to the world. Increasingly, with our own SEAPAVAA website, our institutional websites and database, we are "wired" into the global network. The mechanisms are there: it's up to us now to work on enlarging their content and making them desirable sites to visit. It all depends on us! Ray Edmondson
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