In the past year, I have had the honour and privilege of presenting some of the achievements we have accomplished here in Africa at some of the World’s leading heritage forums.
IASA International Conference 2018, University of Ghana, Legon, Accra, Ghana
At the beginning of October last year, I had the privilege of presenting at the 49th international conference of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA), the World’s leading association for professionals “concerned with the care, access and long-term preservation of the world’s sound and moving image heritage.” The conference was held at the University of Ghana, Legon, in Accra, and what a wonderful event it was, and the more so because it was held on African soil. I found the engagement with audiovisual archivists from around the World both stimulating, fascinating and stretching. At the conference, I got to present on “Innovation to Enable Access to the ANC Archives.”
2+3D Photography – Practice and Prophecies 2019 Conference, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Then in May 2019, I presented at what has come to be known as the World’s leading museums photography conference, the 2+3D Photography – Practice and Prophecies 2019 conference at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. I had attended this conference in 2017 and was amazed at the exceptional standard of the presentations from experts from all over the World. The conference has become the bi-annual gathering of the “cutting edge” in the world of heritage digital imaging. The conference is booked up months in advance and attracts leading practitioners from national and private museums, universities and heritage institutions from all over the world including the British Museum, The MET, The Getty, The Tate, The Library of Congress, The Bodleian Library at University of Oxford, National Portrait Gallery of Australia, Harvard Art Museums, Smithsonian Institution, Finnish National Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Rijksmuseum, National Museum of Science and Technology in Milan, MoMA, Louvre Museum, The Palace Museum in Beijing and many, many more. So it was an amazing privilege to be the first person from Africa to present in this forum. Again it was an ANC Archives related presentation “Digitisation, Preservation and Presentation of the ANC Archives”. Below is the recorded live stream of the session. It is well worth looking at other presentations given at the conference all of which can be found in the 2+3D Photography conference online magazine.
IIIF Internatonal Conference 2019, University of Göttingen, Germany
Finally, at the end of June, I was at the University of Göttingen at the 2019 International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) conference. Once again I had the privilege of interacting with innovators from many of the world’s leading universities and heritage institutions. Like in 2018, I was the only African presenting at the conference, but at least I met a fellow African there who is currently based in Belgium. My 7-minute lightning talk was on “Building IIIF Capability into a Digital Asset Management System”. While we are still at the outset of our IIIF journey, we have made some strides over the past year in making IIIF capabilites native to the MEMAT 4 Presentation Layer (PL). More recently we have been developing what we call the Curation Layer to MEMAT 4 with the development of a number of features that allow for the curation of material from a digital archive. Many of these features will have IIIF functionality at their core.
We are thrilled to be hosting Africa’s first IIIF event later this month at the University of KwaZulu-Natal during our Heritage Digital Campus 2019. Don’t miss out on being brought up to speed with the revolution that is happening on the interface between heritage and technology.
