Murray-Bruce, Odugbemi reemphasize need for archives in Nigerian industries
By Zion Rufus
Going into 2023, professionals across sectors have urged leaders and practitioners to embrace archiving not only as a means of storing records for history and research, but also for its vitality to information management and minimization of data loss.
While speaking on some nostalgic movies of the 80s whose records are yet to be recovered, Guy Murray-Bruce, President of the Silverbird Group also re-emphasized the need for media preservation and archiving in Nigeria.
“We have come a long way from the analog era to where we are now,” Guy said. “Someone was just asking me yesterday, would anyone watch a rerun of village headmaster, i said yes, the older generation might love to watch, but the younger generation will watch the digital version of the new movie, they are the ones current, they don’t have anything old; and when he asked me if we could watch it, i had to tell him that for starters, NTA erased all those tapes from Village Headmaster, they don’t even have one episode, not one in their archives, so all that history has gone down the drain, no recording. So we have lost a history right there in broadcasting.”
Revealing further, he shared: “Amongst other things, we also talked about some other old movies, but i don’t know if they have any tapes to refresh the memory of people in the older generation on what it felt like back then and also to educate the younger ones on what TV was like when you want to watch TV from 4pm till midnight on NTA 5. Luckily for us, we are now in an era where digitization has come to stay and even if we don’t know what it holds tomorrow, we do know now, and we can archive a lot of things that we currently do so people can refer to them; someone said something online, stories, works of arts, pictures and so on; and it goes beyond documentation, what is equally important is to put them in categories.”
Especially at a time when natural disasters, cyber-attacks, and data breaches have become more frequent, media preservation and archiving now sit as a vital records management process that businesses need to fully adopt for the preservation of historically valuable films; as we know, film decays within years if not properly stored, and history will be lost if not preserved.
Renowned writer and filmmaker, Femi Odugbemi equally urged photojournalists to leverage technology offerings such as cloud storage and many others as they move to prioritise archiving and playing their role in the preservation of visual representation of historical events.
While addressing photojournalists at the second edition of the Guild of Photojournalists Awards Odugbemi asked: “How many of us actually have a viable, indexed archive of our work? Are you exploiting the technology that is available not only to be able to take pictures of what is going on now, but to also be able to offer us images from years past? We need archives. You’ll find that a lot of things that we are doing now, we did exactly the same way before. A lot of fault lines in this political season were the same fault lines as far back as the days of Shagari. Essentially we really need people who understand the need for us to articulate a way forward. people who are able to give us an archive of not only our way forward, but how we get there, because often, how we find context is being able to confront what has gone before. I don’t know how many of our media houses have paid attention to archiving stories and photographs of the past.”
Archiving is the process of storing and preserving records, usually in a digital format. It is a systematic way of collecting, storing, and preserving records for future use.
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