SABC Cape Town Principal Librarian Marlene Ungerer training at the SABC Radio Archives in Auckland Park

Marlene Ungerer and Cate Jele

The Principal Librarian of the SABC Media Library in Cape Town, Marlene Ungerer, was this week in Auckland Park at the SABC Radio Archives.

SABC Cape Town is planning to appoint a Radio Archivist for the first time, and the archivist will be expected to report to the Principal Librarian in Cape Town. SABC Cape Town Media Libraries provides services to the following radio stations: Good Hope FM, RSG, SAFM and Umhlobo Wenene. A need was identified for training for Marlene to be able to understand the role and complexities of the post.

Cate Jele, the Acting Manager and Team Leader of the request team, trained her on the in-house cataloguing system, Natural Document Management (NDM), as well as all the processes, systems and procedures of working in the Radio Archives.

Marlene expressed her delight in being able to learn so much in one week, as well as walking away with a new understanding about the work of the radio archivists.


Blog post by Karen du Toit, Afrikaans Archivist in the SABC Radio Archives.

Knowledge Café newspaper publishing daily - created by SABC Media Libraries

The SABC Media Libraries' newspaper focusing on Knowledge Cafés and Knowledge Management, The Daily Knowledge Café, is a good way to get the most recent information available in social media.

Paper.li generates the newspaper automatically on a daily basis.

 As we are having an upcoming Knowledge Café by the guru himself, David Gurteen, this is one of the ways to update us again about the topic.

Please tell us what your thoughts are about the newspaper? Should the topics be more broader than knowledge café and knowledge management?


Blog post by Karen du Toit, Archivist, SABC Radio Archives


Related posts:

- David Gurteen Knowledge Cafe - background reading in preparation

- Paper.li, a great tool for link building, content curation and social networking

British Library Audiovisual Archiving training workshop

British Library

A British Library Audiovisual Archiving training workshop is busy taking place here at the SABC from 28 March to 1 April 2011.

The workshop focuses on audio and video archiving and will be funded by the British Library who will also do the training. For this workshop the British Library in cooperation with the SABC Media Libraries have invited:

1. The SABC Regions who do not always have hands-on access to training
2. One participant from the following 5 countries who are SABA members: Namibia, Swaziland, Lesotho, DRC and Angola. We are working closely with UNESCO in this regard.

The SABC hosts and provides the necessary equipment. Where the SABC do not have the required equipment, the British Library brought the equipment with them.The British Library is funding the workshop as well as the workshop delegates.

25 people are attending, with representatives from Namibia, Swaziland, Lesotho and the DRC.

The SABC Media Libraries hope that this will be the beginning of a long-term relationship with the British Library and that both SABA and the SABC will benefit greatly from this initiative with more member countries to get involved. – Ilse Assmann (Manager, SABC Media Libraries)

The invitation letter from Dr Janet Topp Fargion, Lead Curator, World and Traditional Music of the British Library had the following details:

The British Library has received support from the World Collections Programme to run a course on sound and audiovisual archiving in South Africa. The programme builds on similar training provided in Kenya since 2009.

Participants for the programme are being drawn from the SABC Regional branches and from broadcast archives in other southern African countries.

The training will cover issues of documentation and collection management, digitization of audio and video collections, and storage. It will take place in studios of the SABC to ensure as much hands-on experience as possible. For this reason too the number of participants is being kept to a minimum.

The trainers from the British Library will include Dr Janet Topp Fargion (Lead Curator, World and Traditional Music), Andrew Pearson (Maintenance Repair & Design Engineer, Sound and Vision) and Will Prentice (Head of Technical Services, Sound and Vision).