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© Newswise.
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Afghan Media Project Archived
AFGHAN MEDIA RESOURCE ARCHIVED AT WILLIAMS COLLEGE WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Sept. 14, 2001 - Over the last summer, Williams College Professor David B. Edwards, Afghan journalists, and technical experts have worked to save a precious archive - hundreds of hours of film and thousands of photographs of Afghanistan. As war raged across Afghanistan from 1987 to 1992, the AMRC accumulated approximately 3,000 hours of videotape,100,000 negatives and slides, and 1,600 hours of audiotape. To put this into perspective, if a person wished to review all of the AMRC material, he would need to devote about 10 months of his life - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. "Archived in Peshawar, Pakistan - where the temperature during the summer can reach 120 degrees and the power is unpredictable," Edwards said, "the archive was in danger of destruction from heat and dust. Year by year the quality of the film and negatives was degrading and it needed to be preserved." Hearing of the plight of the AMRC archive in early 2000, Edwards contacted the AMRC to offer Williams College's assistance. Edwards has published widely on religion and politics in Afghanistan, as well as on other issues in the study of Islamic politics. Edwards learned that AMRC's director Haji Daud had commissioned a study to pinpoint feasible preservation. As a result, a plan for digitizing crucial parts of the archive was developed and it was recommended that the AMRC establish a partnership with an educational or research institution in the United States, which could provide a repository for a substantial part of the archive. "This is a unique resource," Edwards said. "It's the most extensive collection of material associated with the Afghan war, and also one of the best collections on a guerrilla movement that exists anywhere in the world." "We see in these videos and photos the emergence of the Taliban regime and gain insight as well into the evolving role of Arabs who originally went to Afghanistan to participate in the battle against the Soviet Union and ended up exporting Islamic Jihad throughout the Muslim world," Edwards said. This summer Abdul Wahab, head of the photographic section of the AMRC brought two members of his staff to Williams College to learn how to digitize the AMRC archive. Aided by Williams graduates and students Greg Whitmore, Steve Taylor, Michael Gross, and Ben Martell, about 3,000 images and 700 hours of video have been scanned and digitized, and the AMRC database system updated. The AMRC delegation in Peshawar will continue to digitize the remaining portion of the archive, with copies of the newly digitized material to Williams, which will serve as a permanent repository. Pending funding support, the process should be completed in 2003. END Contact:
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