Audiovisual Knowledge Management and the Fear to Lose Control

In the past, knowledge of any kind was long time monopolized by a few high ranking persons of a community. Since technology enabled people of all social layers in nearly all regions of the world, the problem of monopolization is increasingly repressed. However, cultural diversity in dealing with knowledge and its status is still reflected in societal behaviour and reproduces historical conditions regarding audiovisual archiving even now.
This paper is to introduce the process of implementing a small scale university AV archive and the many contradictory issues in dealing with it as a working tool, as a knowledge property, as a place of higher or lower levels of safety and as the troublesome memory of academic fallacies.
In a critical review, the way keywords and basic bias work is described as well as its effect on the implementation process. In result, an open strategy is proposed to identify culturally determined perspectives in distinction from individual understandings in this matter. The material used is collected through a two year university project at Universiti Putra Malaysia and subsequent discussions.