Crosscultural cooperation in broadcasting archives

- Introduction

- Some Hints

- Botswana - Sweden

- Thailand - The Netherlands

INTRODUCTION

The Archives at Risk project is a global initiative to safeguard endangered audiovisual archives. Apart from lobbying activities and developing a website with information, guidelines and standards, the project encourages cooperative projects between organizations. The underlying idea is that organizations that are planning for audiovisual archiving or have just started out doing so can pro?t from the experiences of those that have been involved for a long time in audiovisual archiving, preservation and digitization.

In these cooperative projects professionals will be working together with different cultural backgrounds. As they all work in audiovisual archiving, they may share professional expertise to a greater or a larger extent, depending on the archival traditions and training systems from which their knowledge comes. But even if they can rely on a common professional framework, they will presumably not be familiar with the cultural environment in which their partners live and work. For their project to be successful they will have to develop a sensitivity to differences in social codes, styles of management, forms of communication, and societal structures. Without awareness of differences any cooperation between partners in different countries will turn out to be frustrating rather than rewarding.

What partners bring to a project will be different in every individual case, and for Archives at Risk it is not possible to provide a recipe for success. However, to give potential partners some hints of what may be involved, we present two case studies of cooperation projects, one between partners from Sweden and Botswana, the other between partners in Thailand and the Netherlands.

As a preamble we offer some very general remarks that may set you thinking about preparing for your own project. The best advice we can offer is of course to talk to someone who knows the situation from direct experience. This whole project is about sharing experience, and for this aspect too the surest way to gain some insight is sit down with a colleague who knows a few things and talk about it.

The CCBA is supported by:

Background

This brief study is a contribution to the Archives at Risk project from the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision and the Netherlands National Commission for UNESCO. In 2007 these organizations set up a project together looking at the ethics of crosscultural cooperation between broadcasting archives.
At a seminar in Hilversum, the Netherlands, on 8 and 9 February 2008 about 25 participants discussed their experiences with ethical issues and cultural differences, particularly in cooperative projects. Some presentations of this meeting are available as downloads.
As a next step it was decided to write up two cases studies on intercultural cooperation between audiovisual archives and combine them with a short general introduction. These cases were discussed at a special session at the FIAT Conference in Copenhagen on 20 September 2008. Yola de Lusenet (independent consultant, Amsterdam) was then commissioned to prepare the final text.

Ackknowledgements

The materials for the case studies were made available by Eva-Lis Green (Botswana), and Irmgard Noordhoek and Kannika Chivapakdee (Thailand). For the context and general introduction input was provided by Annemieke de Jong (Sound & Vision), Kara Van Malssen (New York University), René Teijgeler (Culture in Development) and Vincent Wintermans (Netherlands National Committee for UNESCO).

Downloads

> All pages in one PDF
> Workshop & Position-paper

This text is made available in the framework of the Archives@Risk project under a Creative Commons License.