Ghana To Mark ‘World Day For Audiovisual Heritage” With Public Engagement

October 27, marks the "World Day for Audiovisual Heritage", a day set aside by UNESCO to commemorate the adoption, in 1980 by the 21st General Conference, of the Recommendation for the Safeguarding and Preservation of Moving Images.

The World Day for Audiovisual Heritage provides an occasion to acknowledge and to raise general awareness of audiovisual heritage and to take urgent measures to preserve it as an integral part of national identity.

This year's theme is: "Its your Story - Don't lose it".

The United Nations encourages all nations, people and Archival Institutions across the globe to organise programmes to commemorate the day through education and public awareness on issues related to audiovisual heritage.

According to a UNESCO report, “audiovisual heritage materials, such as sound, image and moving image recordings, which include private collections, recordings at broadcasting and television stations, Ministries of Tourism, Culture and Information, museums and academic institutions; contain the primary records of the 20^th and 21^st Centuries. These recordings have in recent times become the permanent complement to the traditional written record. Nonetheless, they are highly vulnerable.”

“Already, much of this heritage has been permanently lost through poor storage conditions, lack of skills to effectively manage them, lack of institutional support, etc”.

According to a recent statement by the Director-General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, “We have 10 to 15 years left to transfer available audiovisual recordings to digital media and prevent their loss ….”.

Judith Opoku-Boateng, Archivist, Institute of African Studies University of Ghana Legon, Accra said: “In Ghana, much of our heritage has been expensively captured on audiovisual formats and kept in our heritage institutions. Sadly, these priceless collections are in a state of neglect because the Archivists and the archival institutions face the unnerving task of managing them”.

She further notes that “the preservation of endangered archives is not solely a technical, or even a financial issue; it also has a strong social component, which once again underlines the need for cross-disciplinary thinking”.