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Archives for the Future: Global Perspectives on Audiovisual Archives in the 21st Century.

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Archives for the Future: Global Perspectives on Audiovisual Archives in the 21st Century. Edited by Anthony Seeger and Shubha Chaudhuri. Gurgaon, Haryana, India: Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology, American Institute of Indian Studies; Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2004. [xxviii, 300 p. ISBN 81-7046-223-1. $30.] Illustrations, bibliography.

Archives for the Future is an eye-opening book. In December 1999 a group of audiovisual archivists met in Manesar. India at a conference sponsored by the Ford Foundation. The intent was to bring together archivists from non-Western "industrializing" countries to discuss issues and possible solutions in audiovisual archives. Anthony Seeger and Shubha Chaudhuri, the conference's two organizers, edited the volume. Seeger, then head of Smithsonian Folkways, was the only representative from an American institution. The other conference organizer, Shubha Chaudhuri, is archivist at the Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE) of the American Institute of Indian Studies.

The conference departed from the standard academic format in favor of group discussion and problem solving. All the participants spoke English, and each was required to provide a brief position paper. Rather than presenting their papers formally, however, the participants made them available to each other ahead of time, and then engaged in discussions that eventually resulted in formal documents. The book is made up of two introductory sections: one on preservation and technology, focusing on a presentation by Dietrich Schuller, who represented the International Association of Audio and Audiovisual Archives (IASA), and a section on "Rights, Intellectual Property, and Archives Today." Both include questions and discussion. The remainder of the book consists of the original position papers of the participants, transcriptions of role-playing sessions in which they represented the attitudes of archivists, collectors, and administrators, and the final working documents. A bibliography current through 2001 and a list of Web sites for pertinent organizations conclude the volume. On the whole it presents an enlightening view of audiovisual archives in other parts of the world.

Americans tend to assume that we are automatically at the forefront of innovation and technology, but publications like this one reveal the fallacies in such...

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