FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2025

A EBU report released in spring 2025 has offered critical insights about the current state of public broadcast media (PSM) archives, as they negotiate new challenges related to AI, misinformation and copyright clearance. Recognising the urgency to unlock the potential of broadcast collections, the report also recognises that PSM archives are well-positioned for this task, given that they ‘hold the key to contextualisation’ (EBU 2025: 22).

Taking the EBU report’s findings as its departure point, this presentation will reflect on the necessity and possibilities for better contextualising past histories of audiovisual collections in PSM archives’ metadata. Preliminary findings will be shared from the current, funded AV-DATA project (2024-2025), a collaborative project with the aim to explore strategies to 1. better integrating broadcast archive histories into institutional documentation (i.e. metadata enrichment) and 2. share the ‘story’ of archival collections with broader audiences.

For the first aspect, an initial consultation has taken place with archive staff across the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (NISV), ahead of semi-structured interviews with PSM archivist colleagues in the European context. The second concern, of audience engagement, has taken the form of a pilot project to develop a ‘Tilt story’, as an interactive digital heritage format to generate improved public knowledge of AV-collection histories. The presentation will conclude with a preview of the ‘toolkit’ that has been developed as part of the AV-DATA project, and a critical evaluation of the project’s selected approaches to the challenge of improving contextualisation of broadcast archival collections today.

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.

The presentation explores the comprehensive archiving and publication processes of Yle's program content, with a particular focus on factual programming. It emphasizes three key areas: archiving program content, republishing or reuse, and the ethical and moral considerations surrounding programs published indefinitely on Yle's online streaming service, Yle Areena.

Initially, the focus will be on the AV archive database designed for Yle's internal use. The primary questions center on journalistic and cultural perspectives, as well as Finnish law, which guide the long-term preservation of Yle's programs. We will examine who can access the archive database and under what conditions, while considering the significance of maintaining the authenticity of archived programs and the conditions under which they may be altered.

Next, we will explore the principles behind republishing archive programs. Publication decisions consider legal, ethical, and journalistic guidelines, with particular attention to personal stories and sensitive topics. We will assess whether such publications require additional conceptualization, such as an accompanying editorial article or at least a note in the program's description. For instance, expressions and behaviors that were accepted in the past are evaluated within the context of today's society, with historical background information provided when necessary to enhance understanding.

Finally, we will explore the principles related to the modification or removal of published archive programs from Yle Areena. Ethical considerations, including privacy and freedom of speech, play a crucial role in these decisions. Additionally, we will detail the responsibilities of the editor in charge when handling requests to remove videos from the online platform.

The Archives of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) is cultural heritage and should be available to the Norwegian public. Open archives are an important democratic principle and tell us about our societal development, who we used to be, and who we are today. We call our archive Norway’s diary.

We have over 240,000 unique programs on our streaming platform NRK TV. But how does all our content hold up for modern viewers?

Archive content needs context. We have experienced that time works both for and against us: what was once acceptable may be perceived differently today. At the same time, things that were very difficult many years ago may be completely unproblematic today.

NRKs rule is as follows: NRK shall have a low threshold for publishing content, a high threshold for removing it – and the content we curate, we curate for a contemporary audience.

In the process of publishing the archive we had many discussions and different solutions. In our presentation we will show a wide range of cases of how NRK considers ethics when making the past accessible.

We're going to talk about how we handle our skeletons in the closet.

The growing reliance on artificial intelligence technologies in film archiving has raised increasing concerns regarding the neutrality of these systems: particularly in representing non-Western productions. Global tools such as Google Cloud Video Intelligence and Amazon Transcribe are commonly used in audiovisual archiving; however, their linguistic and cultural training raises questions about their ability to accurately represent Arab films.

Although advancements in Arabic language processing have improved AI’s capacity to interpret Arabic content, challenges remain. These systems may still reproduce algorithmic biases stemming from unbalanced training data or design assumptions. Furthermore, the complexity of the Arabic language, especially its dialectal and cultural diversity, continues to pose unresolved technical and archival obstacles. This gap has yet to be systematically studied through comparative analysis with specialized Arabic-language AI models. If unaddressed, the integration of such global technologies into Arab film archives risks producing digital repositories that misclassify or marginalize local narratives, thereby distorting cinematic memory.

This research proposes an applied analytical study to examine the potential bias of global smart archiving systems toward Arab films. It evaluates the performance of Google Cloud Video Intelligence and Amazon Transcribe, comparing their results to those of specialized Arabic AI models. The study also explores the potential for integrating Arabic models via a dedicated API to enhance the performance of global systems and proposes practical solutions to foster a more inclusive Arab digital film archive.