Online Balloting begins December 8, 2009
and ends January 8, 2010

CODE OF ETHICS
As proposed November 3, 2009 by the AMIA Advocacy Committee

Click here to read the Candidate Statements

The Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), a collective of individuals, recognizes the diversity of its membership and encourages each individual who acts as a custodian of our moving image heritage to strive towards the following common goals:

1) To respect the value of moving images for their cultural, historical and/or artistic significance.

2) To provide the best possible conservation environment for artifacts in his/her care, regardless of the medium or format.

3) To encourage collection development and to adopt collection management policies that define collection scopes and articulate how collections should be maintained.

4) To restore and preserve artifacts without altering the original materials, whenever possible. To properly document any restoration/preservation decisions and to make decisions consistent with the intentions of the creators, whenever appropriate.

5) To balance the priority of protecting the physical integrity of objects/artifacts with facilitating safe and non-discriminatory access to them.

6) To provide access to content, as much as possible, without infringing on current copyright or intellectual property rights laws.

7) To agree that archivists who care for collections should refrain from exploiting artifacts from those collections for personal benefit.

8) To share, as much as possible, information, expertise and technical knowledge, and to assist colleagues so that they may maintain and improve the condition of artifacts in their care.

9) To assist colleagues with the protection of highly endangered material that may face destruction due to changes in legal standing or governmental, institutional or individual ability to provide continued care of the material, regardless of the medium and without prejudice.

10) To act with respect towards fellow members and to use membership in AMIA to better ensure the preservation of moving image collections (and related materials) for future generations.