August has been a very busy month. While many staff are away on holiday, the enquiries and numbers of users rise, as they spend their summer break studying and viewing material, or visiting from far afield, laden with donations of family films. Those of us left manning the barricades are now more than ready for the extra day off this Bank Holiday Monday. While the Archive will be shut on Monday, the exhibition spaces at the National Library will be open, so there will be ample opportunity for those holidaymakers, squeezing out the last of the Aberystwyth summer, to see items from our collection on various screens and jukeboxes.
It’s at the end of August that we get to hear of all manner of professional courses, conferences and so forth which take place from now until the end of spring. Some of the upcoming conferences and workshops are sponsored by the EU, which is undertaking a lot of strategic work in the audiovisual sphere at present; some of them are international conferences arranged by professional or trade associations.
NSSAW is a member of several organisations, including FIAF, IASA, AMIA, BISA, FAF, Focal and the BUFVC.
You’ll find links to these organisations on an occasional, personal blog I keep; feel free to visit, there might be something useful or interesting that might catch your eye. There are other more dedicated archivists than I who maintain extensive blogs, which between them deal with a very wide range of related topics. One of the most prolific and erudite of these is the Bioscope. Read it and learn!
