The Casa K’ojom in La Antigua Guatemala, Guatemala, houses a unique collection of physical objects and audiovisual materials devoted to Mayan cultural heritage, both tangible and intangible. What began as a private collection has evolved into a museum where thousands of visitors have learned about Mayan culture and music. This paper highlights the development and care of the collections from …
Documenting ICH in sound and image: A participatory approach to safeguarding intangible heritage
Documentation of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) poses a series of new questions and challenges within the heritage practice. How do we document a heritage that is alive, through the heads, hands and practices of people? Heritage that is neither tangible nor fixed but intangible and dynamic. Heritage that lives within a community, which by its active practice also acts to …
Digitizing collections of musical instruments in Africa: The PRIMA project
In 2013–2014 the Musical Instruments Museum (mim) in Brussels worked with Musée de la Musique (MMO) in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and the Musée Panafricain de la Musique (MPM) in Brazzaville, the Republic of the Congo to build digital inventories of their musical instrument collections. The purpose of this digitization campaign has been to provide a more complete view of musical …
The cost of inaction: Making the case for digitization at Anon University
Anon University is a hypothetical university representing a conglomeration of organizations with holdings of legacy physical audiovisual media. It exempli es a universal conundrum that poses a serious threat to the future value derived from content stored on physical audiovisual legacy media. This paper proposes a new model and application for quantifying the nancial and intellectual implications of decisions regarding …