A Day for Audiovisual Heritage

Can you remember where you were and what you were doing when you witnessed, by television or radio, the destruction of the World Trade Centre in New York on 11 September 2001? The Indian Ocean Tsunami of 26 December 2004? The first Moon landing on 20 July 1969? Unforgettable events in living memory, these marker points in history are events which our children and our childrens’ children must see and hear.

But will they? Coverage of the events of “9/11” and its aftermath are held in television libraries around the world. So, too, the devastating images of the tsunami in which entire communities disappeared. But what of the Moon walk? The original videotape on which those historic transmissions were recorded is now lost – only copies are left.

That first moon walk was less than 40 years ago. And 40 years from now, in an uncertain world of shifting structures, how many of today’s radio and television libraries, film and sound archives and digital data banks will still be intact and accessible?

Much, perhaps most, of the world’s audiovisual heritage of the last century has been lost already. Much more is threatened. It’s not just the news of the day; it’s the great films, songs, speeches and musical performances of the past; it’s the soap operas and advertisements which so accurately chronicle social history; it’s the evocative ethnographic recordings of peoples, places and animals that now survive only in memory.

The process of preserving and providing permanent access to the world’s audiovisual heritage involves a never-ending quest for technical, legal and political solutions, funding, ways to ensure a growing army of skilled professionals, and for creating stable and sustainable institutional structures.

But it’s also a quest for recognition of the audiovisual heritage, which surely now deserves the same cultural stature and resources we accord to the printed word and the graphic arts. From this year on, in concert with film, sound and broadcasting archives and archivists around the world, UNESCO will mark the annual World Day for Audiovisual Heritage on 27 October. A day to celebrate our AV heritage.