Attendees will hear from Julia Huynh, Curator for the Southeast Asian Archive (SEAA) and Melissa Torres, Digitization Coordinator from the University of California, Irvine Libraries Special Collections and Archives. The SEAA is home to broad and interdisciplinary collections documenting the social, cultural, religious, political, and economic life of the Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, and Vietnamese diasporas. Early collections in the SEAA contain numerous first hand accounts documenting the refugee crisis and commentary on human rights.
Presenters will share strategies for collaboratively preserving at-risk audiovisual materials in the SEAA as a demonstration of community-centered care in action. Specifically, they will highlight digitizing Radio Free Asia’s (RFA) Vietnamese Services Broadcasts, one of the first and oldest collections in the archive as a case study. RFA, a private, non-profit corporation, was established by the US Congress in 1994 through the International Broadcasting Act. News of RFA’s federal defundment in March 2025 catalyzed our need to strategize for funding and develop reformatting project plans for the thousands of audiovisual materials in the archive.
This session relates to the following core themes: ethical stewardship, protecting cultural heritage under threat and uncertainty, technical resilience through digitization, and developing structured workflows to mitigate loss and inform future planning.
Moreover, the following questions will be explored:
- How can long-term preservation and ethical stewardship for politically vulnerable collections be sustainable?
- How does the archive put principles of CARE (collaboration, attentiveness, responsiveness and engagement) into practice?
- What role does project documentation play in reflecting institutional memory?
