Journal of Film Preservation - FIAF

Regional Associations / Associations
régionales / Asociaciones regionales
SEAPAVAA
Opening Speech of the 4th Annual SEAPAVAA*
Conference, Kuala Lumpur, April 1999
Ray Edmondson
Honourable Minister Y.B. Dato’ Sri Sabbaruddin Chik, Dato’ Habibah
Zon, Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen, Selamat Sejahtera. It is good to
be here, and on behalf of SEAPAVAA I would like to thank you for your
welcome. We have a very full week ahead of us and we approach it with
some zest!
While we are here in Kuala Lumpur we are looking forward to seeing
something of Malaysia’s capital city. We are also looking forward to the
opportunity of visiting the various institutions which collaborate in the
preservation of Malaysia’s audio-visual heritage. We will have the chance
to gain some insight into the film and television history of our host
country. All of these are vital elements of the conference week, especially
for visitors. Opening such a window on the host country is fundamental
to understanding, and particularly pertinent to the conference theme.
The theme of our conference is “Audio-visual archiving in the new
millennium - working together to preserve our heritage”. We are looking
ahead to the challenges that face us not only today but tomorrow - and,
significantly, we see them in the context of working together - not
separately. Let me reflect briefly on this theme.
The twentieth century has been characterised by the dominance of the
audio-visual media - recorded sound, film, radio, television, video - in its
various forms. The twenty first Century - the first of the new millennium
- will see the dominance of digital technology, as images and sounds are
increasingly created and delivered over the multimedia superhighway, in
its many forms. We are all adapting to this, and I observe that our host
country, Malaysia, is among the global leaders in preparing for this new
technological era. The Internet is already a crucial communication and
delivery tool for audio-visual archives; it offers great potential for making
collections more accessible; on the other hand, it poses enormous
preservation challenges of an entirely new kind.
As we are drawn ever closer together in a world defined by a complex
web of fibre optics we are confronted by our interdependency - our need
to work together, to co-operate. This has been part of the rationale and
the spirit of SEAPAVAA since it began: discovering how, by working
collectively, we can achieve far more than we could ever accomplish
separately. It brings us to share our skills, facilities, ideas and knowledge;
it encourages us to gain a familiarity with each others’ institutions and to
learn with an open mind from the different methods and approaches
that we have each evolved separately. It applies to us as individual
professionals, just as it applies to all of our institutions - large or small.
During this week we are going to analyse some of those co-operative
accomplishments: and we are going to look into the future to see how
we can grow further in developing shared solutions to the huge tasks we
are confronted with.
104 Journal of Film Preservation / 58/59 / 1999