IASA 2017 Annual Conference

“Digitize me, I am a precious sound document”. The Practice and Problems of Selection and Appraisal in an African Audiovisual Archive

The holdings of the Audiovisual Archive of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon, reflect the intellectual activities and interests of at least three generations of different scholars and collectors. It therefore stores the historically highly relevant collections of renowned musicologists such as J. H. Kwabena Nketia, but it also houses other materials, such as nowadays rare and hardly elsewhere collected commercial recordings on hitherto widely spread music-cassettes.

If notoriously scarce funds become available for the African Sound Archivist, they are in more than one case not only attached to certain conditions, but they are usually also not sufficient to digitize the entire archive in one stroke. A decision what and when to digitize first is therefore inevitable, and this decision also implies a (sometimes conflicting) technical and aesthetic appraisal of the archive‘s holdings. What among them is so intellectually or materially valuable that needs to be processed before other less important or less endangered recordings?

In this presentation I will offer an African Archivist’s perspective on this type of decision-making, which also involves the liaising with the differing views of stakeholders such as potential donors and researchers collaborating with the archive.