Capturing Silences of Speaking Archives: The ‘Haerenga’ of India’s Audiovisual Preservation Ecosystem : Long Paper - iPRES 2025 - Wellington, New Zealand / Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa
Abstract
The founder of a private Indian cinema and cinema related material archive, The Cinema Resource Centre (TCRC) in the South Indian city of Chennai wonders how she should keep safe the collection of film material she has pieced together. What is taking ‘good care’ of such archives/ collections? The straightforward answer might be applying preservation techniques, investing in archival skills and digitization, which the centre is trying to cope with. But ‘good care’ can also be interpreted as mobilizing the archives and creating public outreach and engagement programming, where the static material would start to speak. By deep diving into the workings of four private Indian film related material archives and collections namely TCRC, MaNaSu Foundation, Archive of Indian Music and Raymond Israel’s private collection, this paper aims to understand their challenges, how they navigate them and how they hope to harness the creative potential of their holdings for the future. These experiences can help facilitate knowledge exchange between private archivists and the research community, education and civic society practitioners as well as policymakers in order to enhance the development of effective strategies that raise awareness in digitization of archival practices.Details
- Creators
- Madhavi Reddy; Aparna Subramanian; Shruti Hussain
- Institutions
- Date
- 2025-09-01 00:00:00 +0000
- Keywords
- digital humanities
- Publication Type
- paper
- License
- http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
- Download
- 222645 bytes