Archive Capacity Building Activities

Central Australian Archive Digitisation Facility (upcoming)

FNMA has received ABA funding to establish a digitisation facility in Alice Springs in early 2021, to operate until December 2022. This will be used a a training and support facility for First Nations community audiovisual collections.

Archive Platform Project 2019-20

Through ILA funding, FNMA investigated culturally appropriate platforms for cataloguing analogue, digitised and born digital archive objects, as well as providing community access.  The recommendations from that project are set out here.

In 2020, FNMA undertook a successful seven month trial of the Mukurtu archive platform with three pilot sites- PAKAM, PAW Media and Umeewarra Media. FNMA set up the First Nations Media Community Collections Hub to host and support the archives and is seeking funding to expand this support to other organisations in the future. See the project page for more details.

First Nations Media Archiving Toolkit and Manuals 2020

Building upon the Archiving Resources page on our website, FNMA is currently finalising development of an interactive First Nations Media Archiving Toolkit. These guides will be formed into an Archiving Manual planned for release by late 2020.

Getting Started with Archiving Webinar series

FNMA developed four webinars in 2020 to outline the key steps to getting started with archiving. 

Archiving Skillset 

FNMA has commissioned Charles Darwin University to develop a three-unit accredited skillset for archive workers to learn how to digitise analogue audio, video and photo material. To be completed in late 2020 for delivery in 2021. 

Archive Skills Training 2019

FNMA provided training workshops at the Remote Indigenous Media Festival in September 2019 (3 day workshop) and at CONVERGE in November 2019 (2 days).

Remote Indigenous Archiving Fellowships

The National Film and Sound Archive, the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and IRCA (now FNMA) cooperated on the provision of Fellowships for remote archiving practitioners and organisations. More information

Webinar 23 April 2018

IRCA's April 2018 webinar provided an overview of the status of the Archiving Plan, plus some foundation information for starting work on an archive. You can download the presentation here

Preservation Training Workshops 2015

IRCA was successful in gaining funding through UNESCO for a series of preservation training workshops in 2015. Mick Newnham of the National Film and Sound Archive delivered the training, with support from Susan Locke of IRCA. Four to five day workshops were held in Darwin, Alice Springs and Broome with Remote Indigenous Media Organisations and cultural organisations participating. 

November 2014 Introduction to Collection Basics Workshop Canberra

Remote archivists travelled to Canberra in late November 2014 to take the first steps in preserving and protecting some of the significant Indigenous audiovisual collections held in remote communities.

Participants travelled from Warmum, Broome, Lajamanu, APY Lands, Kalkarindji, Alice Springs, Yuendumu and Darwin. The workshop was aimed at participants gaining awareness of the basics of managing their community-based collections in areas such as cataloguing and metadata, storage requirements, disaster management, digital formats and digitisation.

With principal funding from the National Film and Sound Archive, complementary funding from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, and the Northern Territory Library, the participants were able to gain a wide range of essential information as well as see at first hand the work of the NFSA and AIATSIS.  The Indigenous Remote Communications Association facilitated the workshop.

Participants were enthused about the opportunity to meet with other Indigenous archive workers, gain information from NFSA and AIATSIS experts, share experiences and have the high cultural value of their work affirmed.