Search and Assist
Institutes of PNG Studies
Director, Don Niles.
One of the directions the NFSA is actively pursuing is further developing our relationship with the audiovisual archiving community within the SE Asia and Pacific region. For over a decade the NFSA has supported individual archives and organisations through projects sponsored by the Australian Government, UNESCO, ASEAN and the South East Asia Pacific Audio Visual Archives Association (SEAPAVAA).
The work of the NFSA with archives in the SE Asia and Pacific has given us a unique view of the problems facing audiovisual archives in the tropics and the more innovative ways archives have solved some of these problems. From this view we have been able to refine the information and techniques and act as an agent for the dispersion of information through, not only the local region, but also as far a field as Africa and Latin America. This work has cemented NFSA as one of the most active audiovisual archiving organisations in the world and the pre-eminent provider of training in audiovisual archiving.
The most recent example of the work of the NFSA in the local region was in July this year when Ray Edmondson, Curator Emeritus NFSA, and Mick Newnham, Senior Researcher, travelled to Papua New Guinea. The brief was broad, to visit known audiovisual collections and locate other significant collections and assess ways in which the NFSA could potentially assist the people responsible for these collections in improving their preservation practices. View full article here»
Sound Day has passed but the noise continues!
The NFSA celebrates the importance of sound in the landscape of Australian audiovisual culture with its annual Sound Day program. Celebrations this year were marked with musical memories and musings from Sounds of Australia Patron, performer Robyn Archer, Commercial Radio Australia CEO Joan Warner and Arts Minister the Hon. Peter Garrett AM MP in Canberra on Tuesday 18 August.
Joan Warner delivered the NFSA's annual Thomas Rome Lecture and shared her insights into the challenges for the commercial radio industry and the impact of digital radio in an ever changing media landscape.
Robyn Archer, together with pianist Michael Morley, took us on rhythmic journey through the songs and sounds of her childhood and youth in a special program: Radio and Me - you can't make love by wireless!
Minister Garrett announced the additions to the Sounds of Australia Registry in 2009. The much-loved Happy Little Vegemites jingle, Yothu Yindi's song of Indigenous aspiration Treaty and Helen Reddy's feminist anthem I am Woman were among the ten recordings added to the registry.
''From Vic Simms' 1973 song The Loner about racism and Indigenous dispossession to Dorothea Mackellar's recitation of her own iconic poem My Country and Smoky Dawson's Adventures of The Singing Bullet, these sounds are very familiar and help tell the Australian story,'' Mr Garrett said.
''It is my great pleasure to announce their inclusion in the registry and to see them celebrated in this way, preserved for future generations to enjoy.''
Nominations are now open for the 2010 Sounds of Australia. Take a moment to discover all the sounds on the Sounds of Australia Registry and nominate a sound you think should be included on the registry.
NFSA pays respect to Australian entertainment legend
Ray Barrett in A Shifting
Dreaming (Imago Holdings)
Ray Barrett has died at the age of 82. Barrett was a stalwart of Australian entertainment industry winning, amoung many other acclaims, an AFI award for lifetime achievement in 2005. Some of Ray's feature film appearances included A Shifting Dreaming, Don’s Party, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, No Worries and Goodbye Paradise. See australianscreen for more details of these important Australian films or revisit Barrett's illustrious radio, theatre, television and film career on our website.
NFSA Poster collection goes digital
SIS officer Lana Adams with
the new poster scanner.
Posters have always been an awkward item to digitise in the NFSA's, Still Image Services section as to date we have had no efficient way of digitising them. Our choices were either to scan them in sections (usually 3 or 4 scans) and stitch them together using high quality graphics programs, a time consuming and labour intensive process or to photograph them with our Digital SLR, which produces a low resolution file that can not be reproduced to the original poster size.
We recently took the opportunity to review and research new options in the practice of digitising posters in the Still Image Services section. We visited the Australian War Memorial and the National Archives of Australia for demonstrations of their digital scanning capability.
As a result, the NFSA has purchased a scanner that meets our requirements. It is capable of scanning a poster width of up to 914mm, and can handle material with a thickness up to 15mm (such as board mounted material) in a way that will not put collection material at risk.
The posters are scanned at 300dpi but the scanner is capable of a maximum resolution of 1200dpi. Files are saved as uncompressed tiff files averaging around 200Mb for one-sheet posters and 90-100Mb for the smaller daybill posters.
Scans take around 30-60 seconds per poster to physically scan and the files are colour corrected and spotted for dust if necessary. The derivative files, distribution, browse and thumbnail, are then produced for cataloguing into the NFSA collection.
An initial pilot project with a target of 500 daybill posters commenced in April and was completed in June.
The final digitised files include scans from the NFSA's poster collection depicting film, TV shows, Film Festivals, jazz concerts and a variety of publicity material.
Searching the collection online will provide you with a sample of posters, you can view each one individually by following this link and clicking on the image icons.
Poster items from the Collection» 
Recent additions to the online collection
Recent additions to our online resource of film australianscreen online include the works of female filmmakers eight decades apart. The pioneering McDonagh sisters made short documentaries, including some of the last footage of Phar Lap (The Mighty Conqueror). Australia ‘shares' Jane Campion with New Zealand, and you can now compare coverage of The Piano on australianscreen with NZ On Screen.
Other titles from women filmmakers added to ASO in the last two months include the classic documentary Rocking the Foundations (Pat Fiske); features Greetings from Wollongong (Mary Callaghan) and Death Defying Acts (Gillian Armstrong); and TV's Love My Way (co-produced by Claudia Karvan).
