Archives in Times of Peace and War: Safeguarding Audiovisual Memory, Identity, and Authenticity

Audiovisual archives preserve the voices, images, and sounds that define our shared humanity—but these same records are among the first casualties when a crisis strikes. From the Baltic region to Ukraine and beyond, archives have become both witnesses and targets in conflicts that test the limits of cultural resilience, digital security, and professional ethics.

This joint conference of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) and the Baltic Audiovisual Archival Council (BAAC) invites reflections on how we protect both people and collections before, during, and after conflict.

How do we prepare in peace for the realities of war? How do we preserve the authenticity of digital records in an era of AI-generated misinformation? And how do we ensure that the archives of vulnerable and marginalized communities—especially queer, feminist, and immigrant archives—are not erased when visibility becomes dangerous?

We invite proposals that explore theory, practice, and lived experience across the full spectrum of archival work: from technical preservation to ethical frameworks, from front-line documentation to digital forensics, from regional cooperation to global solidarity.

Conference Sub-Themes

Preparedness in Peace: Building Resilience Before Crisis

• Integrating risk management and disaster planning into archival practice
• Regional cooperation, mutual aid, and safe-haven networks
• Training and simulation for emergency digitization and continuity of access

When War Comes: Protecting People, Collections, and Data

• Evacuation vs. protection in place—decision frameworks under pressure
• Staff safety, psychological resilience, and remote coordination
• Encryption, offsite replication, and secure data handover

Targeted Community Memory: Queer, Feminist, Immigrant Archives Under Threat

• Strategies for concealment, coded metadata, and distributed preservation
• Community-based archives as resistance and survival
• Ethics of visibility and consent under repressive regimes

The Archive as Witness

• Audiovisual evidence in documenting war crimes and human-rights abuses
• Chain of custody, verification, and legal admissibility of AV records
• Preserving dignity and consent in survivor testimonies

Digital Authenticity in the Age of AI

• Verification and chain of custody for audiovisual evidence
• Deepfakes, metadata forensics, and watermarking
• Building institutional capacity for trust and provenance validation

Technical Resilience and Preservation Refresh Strategies

• Managing LTO transitions, file-format obsolescence, and checksum integrity
• Balancing cloud, hybrid, and on-prem storage models under duress
• Sustainable refresh cycles and energy-aware digital preservation planning

Reconstruction, Repatriation, and Healing

• Restoring collections and infrastructure post-conflict
• Reconnecting displaced archives and digital repatriation initiatives
• The role of archives in reconciliation, justice, and cultural renewal

Learning from the Past, Planning for the Future

• Lessons from conflict-zone archives worldwide
• Updating archival standards and conventions for an era of uncertainty
• Reimagining the ethics of stewardship in a volatile digital landscape

Transnational Collaboration and Shared Stewardship

• Cross-border partnerships for digital preservation and capacity-building
• Shared infrastructures for validation, metadata exchange, and redundancy
• Diplomatic and legal frameworks for international cooperation in crisis
• Collective advocacy for the protection of cultural heritage under threat

As a membership organization, IASA is open to all. We do ask participants to acknowledge and adhere to our code of conduct. We hope you’ll join us this year in Vilnius, to share your stories & lessons learned. 

Please submit your proposal in English, by completing the form below, before April 13th 2026.

Description of Formats

Peer-Reviewed Contributions

All contributions must report on novel efforts. We do appreciate an honest and investigative view on your process, learning from failures matters as much as, if not more than, celebrating success! While we welcome service providers to tell their story, we will prioritize presentations that include the story of an implementation from the patron’s perspective. Should you choose to participate from a distance, please kindly indicate so on the form. To support a collaborative conference atmosphere, we will prioritize a critical number of on-premises presentations.

Presentations

We invite two kinds of presentations:

• Long presentations (60 mins. including Q&A) must be novel, reporting on previously unpublished work.
• Short presentations (30 mins. including Q&A) focus on new challenges and work in progress. 

Panel sessions  

Proposals for thematic panels to be held during the main conference program. Panel proposals will be judged on the merits of the proposal and relevance for the expected audience. 

Please detail the subject and desired outcomes for the panel discussion as well as the proposed panelists in your proposal. The Program Committee may identify individual thematic papers and invite submitters to form a panel or invite panelists to join a thematic panel. We encourage and prioritize panel proposals and panelists that reflect our diversity, equity and inclusion commitment to broaden subject matter content.  A respectful debate panel structure on a theme or topic is also very much encouraged.

Posters

Posters are ideal for reporting on emerging issues and on works in progress. Your abstract should clearly describe the topic to be presented and states its unique contribution to the field. Posters should aim to improve knowledge, show new technical capabilities, or share solutions and experience in the field.

Workshops and Tutorials

We welcome proposals for workshops and/or tutorials that address the conference themes for IASA.

Workshops are intended to be hands-on and interactive, and proposers are free to decide how to structure and design them. Workshops usually involve the development of a skill, related to the topic covered in the workshop. While workshops involve more hands-on learning, they should also allow for discussion, interaction and debate on the topic of the class.

Tutorials should focus on a single topic and designate whether it aims at an introductory level or an expert level. Tutorials allow time for group discussion of content and debate on the themes and concepts covered in the class. Tutorials need not be hands-on. Proposers are free to decide how to structure them.

Process

The selection of presentations will be made by June 1st by the Programme Committee. The presenters will receive their notification via email after this selection. The Programme Committee reserves the right to propose to the candidates to present under the Conference or the Forum parts of the event and/or in a different format.

Please note: All presenters will be required to register before the early bird deadline.

Submission form.