The Community Archiving Workshop has its origins in a series of Activist Archiving workshops organized by the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program (MIAP) at New York University. In 2010, AMIA’s Independent Media Committee held its first workshop based on the MIAP model.

The goal of these workshops is to help an organization jump-start the preservation of an audiovisual collection—film, video, or audio. The idea is simple: experienced audiovisual archivists partner with local volunteers for a daylong workshop that will assess and catalog as many materials as possible, and in the process, provide hands-on training for local volunteers, so they can carry on the work in the future. The model used thus far is for pairs––one moving image archivist and one community volunteer––to work together. With proper planning, these workshops are not only extremely valuable to your community’s organization—they are also a lot of fun.

The Community Archiving Workshop received an IMLS grant from The Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program to offer a series of regional workshops to address the problem of obsolescence in audiovisual collections. Regional archivists and librarians will receive training by established audiovisual archivists in the essentials of care and preservation for AV collections.