June 25, 2009
Afghan archivists at UW for three-week workshop
Three archivists from Radio Afghanistan are spending three weeks at the UW in a National Endowment for the Arts-funded summer residency workshop on archiving.
The project is an effort to connect the Radio Afghanistan archives to international archives so they can become a part of a worldwide network of audio archives.
The workshop will be taught by Laurel Sercombe, ethnomusicology archivist for the School of Music; and John Vallier, head of distributed media services for UW Libraries.
The summer training project was developed in the context of a larger Preservation and Access grant which began in 2006. NEH purchased the equipment, and archives staff were trained to digitize and catalog several thousand music tapes. The project’s principal investigator is Hiromi Lorraine Sakata, former UW ethnomusicology professor and UCLA professor emerita.
The participants from Afghanistan are Zafar Jan Daqiq, an administrator of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies in Kabul; and Abdul Jamil Wardak and Abdul Wahed Popal, who work at Radio Afghanistan.
You can learn more about the archive and its staff here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/1979482.stm.
