27 October 2020 marked the World Audio Visual Heritage day, which was an occasion to raise general awareness of the need to take urgent measures, to acknowledge the importance of audio-visual documents and promote the free flow of ideas by word and image as a representation of our heritage and memory.
Since 2017, the ‘Sudan Memory’ project funded by the British Council and more recently by the Aliph Foundation has been scanning audio visual and other materials in a whole range of Sudanese Cultural Heritage Institutions.
Sudan Memory is led by King’s College London, with local partners including the Sudanese Association for Archiving Knowledge and the National Records Office.
The scanning began in the Sudan Film Archive with funding from the Norwegian Embassy in Khartoum, and managed by the University of Bergen. The project was taken over by Sudan Memory in 2018, and in 3 years has scanned thousands of fragile and irreplaceable films.
Sudan Memory has also scanned photographs, documents, manuscripts, newspapers, biological samples, objects and artefacts from the National Records Office, the University of Khartoum, the National Museum, The El Rashid Photo Studio in Atbara and the House of Heritage in Abri. Currently the digital collection scanned holds more than 100,000 images.