FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2025

The Value, Use and Copyright Commission of FIAT/IFTA would like to present the recent year’s work researching the impact of generative AI on the audiovisual archiving sector. GenAI impacts the authenticity, integrity, and future accessibility of archival content, and the goal was to write a paper with insights from broadcasting archives who already implemented GenAI. The paper presents guidelines on these aspects:

• Allowing archives to be used for GenAI training – What are the implications, rights, and permissions?
• Handling GenAI-generated content – Addressing authenticity, ownership, and copyright challenges.

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB), a collaboration between the Library of Congress and GBH Archives, goals are to preserve and make accessible material created for American public tv and radio such as voices, culture, and news from communities across the country.  The AAPB fortunately has had funding to support the growth and outreach of the collection, in addition to creating AI tools to help generate metadata.  With US federal funding sources shutting down, the future of support for public media archives in the US is limited.  How do we continue to support the needed staff, the contributors to the AAPB, and be responsible to the historic record?

The GBH Archives, in addition to the AAPB collaboration, is responsible for the preservation and access of the materials created by GBH, the public broadcasting station in Boston that provides over 30% of the content for the US public media system (PBS). GBH Archives website Open Vault provides access to GBH materials and is also facing funding cuts.

GBH Archives has had success with social media outreach, building a following, and licensing of GBH materials.
Highlighting the use of the collection by scholars, journalists, filmmakers, educators, and the public should support the value of the work. Licensing footage brings some revenue, but not enough to support the whole preservation and access ecosystem. The AAPB has been using non generative of AI tools to help create metadata to increase discoverability within the growing collection. Interest in the use of the collection to train tools, as a dataset, could be licensable, but what are the ethics and rights issues in allowing that? Identifying faces, or voices, raises concern. AAPB will share outreach work, the value of making content accessible (even if it might not be dollars), and some stories from the field.

Northern Ireland Screen is part of the UTV Archive Partnership alongside UTV and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, with PRONI storing much of the physical film and tape. Northern Ireland Screen is responsible for the digitisation, curation, hosting, education and creative repurposing of this archive. In 2024 UTV approached us to use our knowledge of their archive to create a six-part TV series. We said, “Yes, please!”

My own background is as an archivist on many television series for BBC Northern Ireland as well as a director of my own feature documentaries. My colleague, Paul McClintock, worked for many years as an editor on a variety of TV shows. Within the archive team of Northern Ireland Screen we had the experience necessary to take the archive and create something new out of it for a modern television audience.

My talk will be about how we went about this process of deciding what the series would be about and what time period to focus on, based upon what would tell the best story of social history and entertainment, combined with it being a period represented by heavily digitised parts of the archive. Of course, for most of UTV’s early history Northern Ireland’s narrative is contentious and the archives represent a divided and violent society. We decided we would bypass the troubled period in history and go back to the start of UTV in October 1959 to tell the story of the 1960s – a time before the violence.

Blending the moving images carefully with the music of the period to create a nostalgic experience, history and entertainment come together. With clips and imagery in the talk, we will tell the story of how a national archive can be repurposed for broadcast again to teach an audience about a more shared past they have forgotten about against a backdrop of all the social change of the 1960s. And, of course, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones drop by as part of the journey.

This is archive truly valorised to live again.

The research team in DR Archive has for 10 years worked to change the workflow of producing new programs with archive content. From being in the end of the production chain, the archive team has moved to the beginning of the production chain. This has resulted in better use of the archive, better focus on rights, and a much higher awareness of the archive content as a big asset for the corporation. I would like to explain the new and better workflow from archive to production exemplified by DR’s 100 years anniversary. The archive was consulted way before the editorials started their program workflows, and this very early visibility of the archive team has resulted in many new programs with archive content not only from the surface of the archive, but from all corners of the archive with experts digging to find the very best materials for each production.

In 2019 the BFI launched the Young Audiences Content Fund (YACF), a government sponsored lottery fund which was designed to support programming for children and young audiences against a backdrop of declining industry output in this area. The Fund would go on to award over £40m to 221 projects developed for free-to-access platforms, including UK broadcasters, with specific goals including diversity, innovation and representation of the UK’s nations and regions. Though the Fund closed in 2022, it had resounding successes with award winning programmes including Big Boys (2022-2025), Sol (2020) and Milo (2021).

From the outset, the BFI National Archive worked with the YACF to preserve all the completed programmes that were supported by the Fund, lead to a remarkable collection of over 1000 titles. This presentation will explore the significance of this funding initiative and the cultural significance of the collection. We will set out the challenges in developing preservation workflows that aligned with programme delivery from commissioning to broadcast and outline how expectations changed over the course of the Fund. We will also discuss the ways in which the fund and BFI National Archive attempted to embed Equity, Diversity & Inclusion principles into the preservation workflows – with varying degrees of success.

The presentation will conclude with a look at our open source approach to archiving innovative Ultra Access interactive programming for the final series from the fund - Mixmups (2023) - and how this might inform future collecting plans.