About CAW
Community Archiving Workshop (CAW) is a volunteer-organized workshop sponsored by the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA). Traditionally, CAW is an annual pre-conference workshop that takes place within the city where the AMIA Annual Conference is held. The goal of these workshops is to help an organization jump-start the preservation of an audiovisual collection—film, video, or audio. The idea is simple: experienced audiovisual archivists partner with local volunteers for a daylong workshop that will assess and catalog as many materials as possible, and in the process, provide hands-on training for local volunteers, so they can carry on the work in the future. The organizers of CAW created a Handbook to document their process and help other groups organize a CAW in their community, which is available through this site.
TOT Project
In April 2018, The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) announced funding in support of The Community Archiving Workshop Training of Trainers (TOT), a project of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, in the production of a series of regional workshops which will address the problem of obsolescence in audiovisual collections. The project includes the development of an online toolkit that provides access to the TOT curriculum, documentation, and resources within and across regions.
Toolkit Purpose
The purpose of the TOT toolkit website is to promote, develop curriculum, and share community archiving workshops throughout regions. Primary objectives are to:
- Present Curriculum to train and conduct a CAW
- Share how other CAWs look and their documentation
- Provide access to resources and templates
- Aggregate workshop documentation and experiences