In this book, the author tries to shed light on the rich and distinctive audiovisual heritage of Palestine, in an attempt to preserve it through modern means and document the long-threatened Palestinian collective memory amidst the difficult political and living conditions of the Palestinian people. The book discusses this topic from three angles: the history of the emergence of these audiovisual materials, then the whereabouts of the scattered and fragmented collections in archives all over the world and how to access them, and finally some of the technical principles applied in the field of modern digital archiving to help practitioners in this field in the Arab world.
In addition to the substantive research based on the science of digital archiving, the book addresses also some of the core issues related to the continued and deliberate attempts by Israeli institutions to bury the Palestinian cultural identity, and erase and control the collective memory of the Palestinian people. Consequently, it discusses in an objective manner the issue of looting and the loss of audiovisual collections in Beirut after the 1982 Israeli invasion. These collections had a unique cultural and historical value, having been produced under the militant struggle of the Palestine Liberation Organization since its inception.
This study is amongst the first studies to address the issue of the Palestinian audiovisual heritage, not from the political or historical background of the Palestinian cultural production and movement, but rather from the scientific and pragmatic perspective of modern archiving sciences; In doing so, it paves the way for more substantive and in-depth subsequent studies.