Today – 27 October is the World Day for Audiovisual Heritage. It is a key initiative by UNESCO and the Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Associations (CCAAA) to honour audiovisual preservation professionals and institutions that safeguard our heritage for future generations. Around the world, audiovisual archives join together annually on this day to celebrate their work with events that highlight the vulnerability of these valuable materials and the often unheralded work of the institutions that provide protection, preservation, and access to the materials. The theme for WDAVH 2023 is: “Your Window to the World”. 

The Digitisation Centre of Western Australia (DCWA) was established and began operating in 2021 with the goal of digitising major Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences collections in WA which include audiovisual materials in obsolete formats, thus bringing alive the cultures and memories captured in those analogue footages and recordings. Some of the early audiovisual materials the Centre has digitised are University films from UWA Library Special Collections, which are now available on UWA Collected: https://collected.uwa.edu.au/nodes/view/2382. 

If you want to learn more about the digitisation and preservation of audiovisual materials in the DCWA, feel free to email [email protected] or visit The Digitisation Centre of Western Australia.