Safe and Affordable Archives for Activist Media

WITNESS

Written by yvonneng on Tue, 02/23/2016 – 10:55

WITNESS supports people around the world who are using video to document human rights abuses. Through direct engagement and response, training and training resources, and advocacy to technology companies, we work to ensure that activists and citizens can use video effectively, safely, and ethically to expose the truth and advocate for justice.

We believe that grassroots video archiving and preservation is key to enabling the use of video documentation in long-term advocacy campaigns, for its admissibility as authentic and reliable evidence in courtrooms, and for historical memory and truth-telling, especially given that perpetrators in power often seek to erase or deny their crimes.

To support the activist media collectives, NGOs, and concerned citizens who are documenting human rights with their cameras, we have developed resources such as the Activists’ Guide to Archiving Video and have led in-person trainings and workshops internationally.

A persistent challenge we have encountered is that even after these groups have acquired the knowledge and informational resources to better collect, describe, store, and preserve their collections, many remain unable to take the next steps. Many available tools that could support their work are unaffordable or require significant infrastructure to run. Other tools that are open-source or free are difficult to use and require special technical know-how to incorporate into workflows. And activists have particular security and safety concerns that need to be addressed. Donating to an institutional archive is often not an option because no such local institutions exist, or they cannot guarantee security and access restrictions, or because groups need to regularly access and use their collections.

We need effective archival workflows for video that will work in low-resource and low-infrastructure settings, that take security concerns into consideration, that can be realistically implemented by people who are not professionally trained archivists, and who may work in a distributed or networked way. What existing practices, systems, and tools could be incorporated into such a workflow? What practices, systems, and tools could be developed or built upon to create an accessible solution for grassroots documenters and collectors? What realistic degree of preservation can be expected from this kind of workflow? What aspects of archival best practices must be maintained, and what practices are more flexible?

The ideal outcome of this project would be a user-tested packaged kit of interoperable tools with clear documentation, instructions, and visual aids, accompanied by a report that includes case studies and recommendations for further work to be done.