• AVMS conducted a full-day workshop for librarians attending the August 2011 IFLA conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico.  The workshop was aimed at librarians in organizations where preservation and access for a/v material was not their primary occupation, but who still need to understand handling and management of a/v materials.  This Workshop was organised by AVMS in collaboration with the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón, Puerto Rico and the New York University Moving Image Archiving & Preservation Program with financial support from the National Library of Sweden and the National Library of Norway.  It took place at the Sacred Heart University Library.  The instructors were Howard Besser of New York University and James Turner of Université de Montréal.  The slides from Howard's presentations are available at http://besser.tsoa.nyu.edu/howard/Talks/. According to the evaluations, the workshop was very successful at helping librarians learn about handling of a/v materials.

• AVMS held a joint session with IFLA's Preservation and Conservation section, labeled "The media is the message!" The convergence of media in rapidly changing societies from a user perspective as well as the demand for preservation.  Eight papers were delivered in this session, discussing convergence of media , as well as the demand for preservation as the digital revolution accelerates.  Papers discussed automatic multilingual picture indexing, media services in North American libraries, preservation of A/V materials in Japan's National Diet Library, the impact on preservation from aggressively promoting use of a new media collection at an academic library, and issues of managing public performance rights in an academic library.  For the text of the papers, see http://conference.ifla.org/past/ifla77/2011-08-17.htm, session 161.
  

• The theme for UNESCO's 2011 World Audiovisual Heritage Day was ""Audivisual Heritage: See, Hear, and Learn."  UNESCO offices held celebrations this year, as did several dozen other organizations around the world (see http://www.pia.gov.ph/wdavh2011/).  In New York, students from NYU's Moving Image Archiving & Preservation program spent an entire year planning and coordinating an event with about a dozen local collections.  Held at Museum of Modern Art, "Out of the Frame: Preserving Faces and Voices from the Margins" was one of the more successful events held within North America.  Please consider planning your own event for Oct 27 2012!
  
• UNESCO previously held a competition to create a logo for Audiovisual Heritage.  The competition was won by Mr Achilleus Coronel of the Philippines with this logo:

• AVMS's Guidelines for Audiovisual and Multimedia Material in Libraries and other Institutions is now available in 20 languages.  The Section has been bringing these 2004 guidelines more up to date by adding more information about born digital content and digital copies, as well as about metadata.  And it is considering translating and distributing the "Audiovisual and Multimedia Guidelines" developed by the French Ministry of Culture.  More focus will be put on this in 2012.
  

• CCAAA (http://www.ccaaa.org/), the umbrella organization encompassing IFLA-AVMS, FIAF, FIAT, AMIA, and other organizations is going through a major transition phase, much of it due to funding problems.  The role of Convenor (chairperson) has been eliminated, and the Rapporteur will take over some of those duties.  Membership categories will be changed to reflect the difference between associations that exclusively deal with audiovisual (like FIAF and AMIA) vs. more general associations (like IFLA and ICA), with diminished dues and diminished voting rights for the latter.  (This is kind of strange in that IFLA was one of only two CCAAA members that consistently paid dues on time.)  Because of this, IFLA is considering the possibility of dropping CCAAA membership, but not immediately.  Additionally, CCAAA voted to allow an association of profit-making A/V archives (FOCAL) to become a member (which was approved, but with some controversy).
  

• The incoming AVMS Chair Marwa el Sahn is Egyptian, and invited Dr. Shawky Salem from Egypt's Alexandria Center for Multimedia & Libraries to present a video both to the AVMS Section and to a general IFLA meeting.  The video showed how demonstrators protected the Alexandria library from harm, forming a cordon as a human shield around the library.

• The next IFLA meeting will be held in Helsinki, Finland August 11-16 with the theme "Libraries Now! Inspiring, Surprising, Empowering".  AVMS will co-sponsor a session entitled “Copyright and Legal Deposit for Audiovisual Materials" (along with the Law Libraries section).
  
• AVMS will also be jointly sponsoring a pre-conference Satellite meeting in Helsinki August 9-12 under the title "Art Now! Contemporary Art Resources in Library Context".  This will be co-sponsored with ARLIS/Norden and the IFLA Art Libraries Section.

Legal Deposit Survey

• AVMS has begun administering a survey of legal deposit regulations regarding audiovisual materials in countries around the world.  Legal deposit is an important concept in bulding national collections (like that of the Library of Congress) by requiring that a copy of most content distributed in a country be deposited within a national collection.  This survey is designed to shed light on the different legal schemes for deposit in various countries, as well as to try to determine which approaches are most effective in assuring comprehensive national collections.  The survey was designed by James Turner of Université de Montréal, and Howard Besser and Kara van Malssen of NYU, and is administered by Howard and Kara.  Those of us working on it thusfar have reached an impasse mainly due to lack of respondents, but the AVMS section is determined to continue working on this.