CMDS Presents at Radio Archives in European Community Media Conference
CMDS' Joost van Beek and Kate Coyer presented preliminary research findings from their study on the digital content sharing and archiving practices of community media around Europe at the international conference “Radio Archives in European Community Media,” which took place in Halle, Germany, on June 5-6. The conference was organized as part of the EU-funded Captcha project (Creative Approaches to Living Cultural Archives) in which CMDS is a project partner.
In a presentation titled Bold strides or tentative steps? How community media share and archive online, they presented some of the common challenges community broadcasters face and examples of practical solutions they have arrived at. On Saturday, Joost took part in the closing round table discussion, Preserving audio memories – A discussion about the prospects and demands of free radio archives. He outlined the main dilemmas that will loom ever larger over the future of online community media archives, not just in terms of design and structure but also regarding how the work is organized within stations, what skills and investments will be required, and what priorities are set.
The conference program included presentations by Dagmar Brunow (University Växjö), Jacob Kreutzfeldt (University of Copenhagen) and Caroline Mitchell (University of Sunderland), and by radio stations such as Radio Študent (Slovenia) CUAC FM (Spain) and Future Radio (UK). Some presentations focused on showcasing digital archiving tools, and Ingo Leindecker from Captcha project partner Radio FRO introduced the newly developed UVisualize! narrative visualization tool, which will allow existing online archives to present media collections in the form of playlists, maps, timelines or three-dimensional layers. Conference proceedings also featured a live multimedia performance by artists Lale Rodgarkia-Dara and Karl Schönswetter.
Audio from the conference will be made available at the Cultural Broadcasting Archive and the Captcha project website by the end of the month. English- and German-language conference readers include several background texts, including a conversation between Joost van Beek and Michael Nicolai (Radio CORAX).