As the UN celebrates its 75th anniversary, a team of archivists in the Department of Global Communications races to preserve its audiovisual heritage.
For years, the UN’s historic film, video and audio recordings have been at risk due to natural decay, technological obsolescence and challenging environmental storage conditions. In 2016, seeing the importance of preserving this rich collection, the Government of the Sultanate of Oman stepped in with a generous contribution which enabled a 5-year effort to digitize approximately 70 per cent of the archives and make them available through the .
To maximize discovery and publicize these treasures, the AV Library, with the support of the Video Section and Social Media team, is launching a quarterly video series called “”.
The series explores important aspects of the Organization’s history through its use of selected footage, audio and photographs from the audiovisual archive. Episode One will showcase the General Assembly’s picturesque moments, questioning myths and highlighting important resolutions of the Organization’s most representative body.
Produced by AV Library staff members Andrea Ocampo, Ilona Auth and Greg Zeichner, and edited by UN Video’s Joon Park, the team showed commitment, talent and hard work while having fun creating a certain regard into the previously unseen audiovisual archives.?
Ilona Auth, who has a degree in film archiving and has worked with the Oman Digitization project since its inception in 2016, believes that the series is “a step towards fulfilling the archivists’ responsibility to make accessible the invaluable history, cultural heritage and public knowledge contained within the UN audiovisual archives.”
Although the Oman Digitization project has achieved remarkable progress, challenges remain. With the launch of a fundraising promo video in conjunction with the new series, the AV Library team hopes to garner additional support to continuously fund the ongoing stewardship of the digital archives at the Organization.
Please contact the DGC/AV Library for further information: avlibrary@un.org
