IASA 2019 Annual Conference

Señal 3 is a volunteer-run community TV station in Santiago, Chile, located in the working class neighborhood of La Victoria. During the 17 years of dictatorship, La Victoria was, in many aspects, a resistance hub. It was and remains a socially and culturally active neighborhood. Señal 3 has been documenting Chilean history through the eyes of its community; the images that this collection holds are unique in that depict stories that are often untold or unacknowledged. Señal 3 is also active in organizing educational activities for the community and is continuously developing outreach programs to support other community organizations in Chile and Latin America. In 2016, Señal 3 partnered with NYU’s Audiovisual Preservation Exchange program, a collaboration that resulted in the creation of an inventory and the implementation of a video digitization station. Later, Señal 3 established a partnership with Universidad de Chile to support an internship program, which allowed the digitization of part of the collection and the establishment of initial digital preservation activities. In 2019, Señal 3 received national funds to strengthen digital preservation efforts, support the use of archival material for production, and more importantly, to create a website to provide access to their content. The vision for this project, to kick off in March of 2019, goes beyond Señal 3’s collection, and hopes to establish the foundation of a national movement for the archiving of community collections. In this paper, we want to share and analyze our process, focusing on what’s next to come.