UW Welcomes Afghan Visitors

Three esteemed visitors from Radio Kabul/Afghanistan arrived in Seattle this past Monday for a 3-week audio archiving workshop sponsored by the UW Libraries and the UW School of Music.

They are:
• Zafar Jan Daqiq, American Institute of Afghanistan Studies;
• Abdul Jamil Wardak, Radio Afghanistan;
• Abdul Wahed Popal, Radio Afghanistan.

The workshop, which is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), has been developed to complement a larger NEH Preservation and Access grant that has enabled Radio Kabul/Afghanistan staff to digitize and preserve nearly 1500 hours of unique music recordings. In addition to providing the participants with hands-on training in audio preservation, the workshop is intended to connect the Radio Kabul/Afghanistan Archives to a larger community of international archives and archivists.

The workshop is co-instructed by Laurel Sercombe (UW Ethnomusicology Archives), and myself, along with help from John Gibbs (UW Libraries), Gary Louie (UW School of Music), Colin Todd (UW School of Music, and others. The Principal Investigator for the workshop and the larger NEH grant is Hiromi Lorraine Sakata, former UW ethnomusicology professor and UCLA Professor Emerita.

Following their 3 weeks in Seattle, Prof. Sakata will accompany the participants to Bloomington for a visit to Indiana University’s Archives of Traditional Music, where Mr. Wahid Nazari (President of Radio-Television Afghanistan) is scheduled to join the group. The group then flies to Washington DC where they will meet with representatives from the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian until their return to Kabul in late July.

More information about Radio Kabul/Afghanistan can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Kabul

A BBC story about the archive and how its staff members (Abdul Jamil Wardak and Abdul Wahed Popal among them) helped save it, can be found here:
http://tinyurl.com/kr4fhf

And if you see our honored guests around UW please make them feel welcome by saying “Salaam Alekum” (Dari for “Hello” / “Peace and blessings be upon you”).

-John Vallier

New Media - June 2009

We’re finishing up the academic year with some great additions to our collection. As for DVDs, we’ve just got in a nice little DIY documentary on Red House, a punk venue in Olympia, Washington. There are also some new Criterion films: Science is fiction, The curious case of Benjamin Button, L’età di Cosimo de’ Medici, Ariel, Blaise Pascal, Cartesius, The love parade, Monte Carlo, One hour with you, and Varjoja paratiisissa. We also got a bunch of new television shows (Battlestar Galactica, SesameStreet, HBO’s Carnivale) as well as new seasons to some shows we already carried.

As for VHS, we've added 260 this month. That's a lot for a dying format -- heh. This is largely due to cataloging videos from the recently acquired EMC collection. A lot of classic education titles in there. And, of course, we are still plodding through a large donation of VHS tapes -- we're up to D's so this month we have a lot of new day and death titles this month

As for CDs, a lot of great new additions to the Puget Sounds collection, including a bunch of titles from Hardly Art Records.

Check them all out here: DVDs, VHS, CDs