Annual Public Lecture

"Endangered Archives of Endangered Languages"
Dr Dietrich Schüller

Ever since the invention of the phonograph in the late 19th century, sound recordings have been an indispensable source for linguistic studies. With the advent of portable video recorders from the 1980s, linguists started to include videos in their research. Today, a considerable amount of linguistic knowledge is based on these audiovisual primary sources.

Cylinders, instantaneous disks, magnetic tapes, optical disks - none of these carriers were developed with longevity in mind. Eventually, all these carriers, and the machines that play them, will deteriorate beyond retrievability. And today, with the increasing pace of technical development, even sophisticated digital formats are constantly superseded by newer ones, leaving no support for older formats. As a result, since about 1990, sound archivists have given up the classic archival aim of preserving the original objects placed in their care. Long term preservation can only be achieved by preserving the content of audiovisual carriers. Information has to be copied from one storage system to the next. Lossless copying is only possible in the digital domain, so all information has to be first digitised.

The lecture describes the various problems and the tasks ahead. The greatest challenge lies in the fact that probably 80% of the world's audiovisual sources in linguistics and related fields - ethnomusicology, anthropology, oral history, etc - are not held in archives. A large amount of internationally important materials are still kept only by the scholars and other individuals who collected them. These collections will not survive the next 10-30 years, unless they are systematically sought and brought into national and international preservation programmes.

Dr Dietrich Schüller

Dietrich Schüller has been the director of the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences since 1972. He is a specialist in audiovisual preservation and restoration, he has worked as a consultant to a number of audiovisual archives world-wide. Dietrich lectures at various Universities in Austria, and has held visiting posts and run training seminars in China, Mexico, and the Philippines. He is currently Vice-President of the UNESCO Intergovernmental Council for the Information for All Programme and Chair of the Sub-Committee on Technology for the Memory of the World-Programme, and a member of the European Commission on Preservation and Access (ECPA), the IASA Technical Committee, and the Audio Engineering Society. He has published extensively on audiovisual preservation.

Selected publications

Schüller, Dietrich, 2004: “Sound recordings: problems of preservation”. In: John Feather (ed.): Managing Preservation for Libraries and Archives. Aldershot, 2004, 113-131.

Schüller, Dietrich, 2004: “Technology for the Future”. In: Seeger, Anthony & Shubha Chaudhuri (Eds.): Archives for the Future. Global Perspectives on Audiovisual Archives in the 21st Century. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2004, 15-70.

Schüller, Dietrich, 2002: Audiovisual Sources and their Future Availability. In: Berlin, Gabriele & Artur Simon (Eds.), Music Archiving in the World. Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung 2002, 123-130.

Schüller, Dietrich, 2001: Preserving the Facts for the Future: Principles and Practices for the Transfer of Analog Audio Documents into the Digital Domain. In: Journal of the Audio Engineering Society (JAES) 7-8/49 (2001), 618-621 (Reprint).

IASA Technical Committee, 2001: The Safeguarding of the Audio Heritage: Ethics, Principles and Preservation Strategy (= IASA Technical Committee - Standards, Recommended Practices and Strategies, IASA-TC 03), Version 2, 2001 (Dietrich Schüller Chairman). http://www.iasa-web.org/iasa0013.htm

Schüller, Dietrich, 2000: Preserving Audio and Video Recordings in the Long-term. In: Manning, Ralph W. & Virginie Kremp (Eds.), A Reader in Preservation and Conservation. (= IFLA Publications 91), München 2000, 46-53 (Reprint).

Schüller, Dietrich, 1996: Audio and Video Materials in Tropical Countries. In: IASA Journal 7/1996, 35-45.

Event Details

Khalili Lecture Theatre,SOAS, 10th February 2006, 5.45pm
Entrance free.
For location, see SOAS maps