FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2025

With the disappearance of magnetic tapes and optical discs from digitisation efforts, the archival landscape has undergone a fundamental transformation. As all content now resides within enterprise-scale data centres, the notion of an archive has shifted from a tangible collection to an "invisible" repository. This raises pressing concerns: how can organisations ensure their digital holdings remain accessible, authentic, and safeguarded over time?

The challenge of digital preservation lies not only in maintaining technical integrity but in ensuring awareness and active stewardship. Without the physicality of tapes or discs, archives risk becoming "out of sight, out of mind." To counter this, institutions must establish robust digital preservation policies that define retention strategies, monitoring protocols, and long-term accessibility plans. Implementing these policies requires a blend of automated verification processes, human oversight, and adherence to evolving standards in digital conservation.

The vendor community plays a pivotal role in supporting these efforts. Technology providers must develop solutions that offer transparency into stored data, facilitate auditability, and ensure sustainable preservation strategies. Vendors can also guide organisations in adopting best practices, integrating AI-driven archival management, and maintaining adaptability to future shifts in digital storage technology.

A proactive approach is essential to ensure archives remain not only present but actively usable. By fostering collaboration between archival institutions and technology vendors, the archival world can bridge the gap between the visible past and the intangible future.

This project addresses the urgent need to preserve an important piece of heritage at risk: approximately 10K hours of RAI news programs produced between 1952 and 1985, currently stored on 350K 16mm reels. These reels document the formative years of Italian television and are threatened by deterioration due to the vinegar syndrome, necessitating immediate physical and digital preservation.

The project goals include having a digital equivalent of film reels for long term digital preservation, having digital copies suitable to any repurpose in current media environments, and preserving the cleaned and repaired films in the best possible condition, to stop physical deterioration.

The project, slated for completion in early 2026 with partial funding from the Ministry of Culture, employs state-of-the-art digitisation technology to create high-quality digital versions in standard, interoperable formats. RAI oversees the entire process, coordinating external providers and ensuring rigorous technical quality control, logistics management, and the creation of synchronised audio-video clips.

A key aspect is the application of AI techniques for automated metadata generation, including transcriptions, facial recognition, summaries and more. This metadata, alongside the digitised content, is integrated into RAI’s content management system, enabling future reuse in production and research.

A low-resolution version of the entire collection, including metadata, will be made accessible for research and educational purpose, through a national digital platform, to public bodies and universities.

This end-to-end migration project, executed within a constrained timeframe, represents a significant undertaking involving diverse teams and a competitive public tender process.

The integration of AI-powered metadata extraction, the commitment to both long-term preservation and immediate exploitation make this project a compelling case study in digital heritage preservation.

SVT’s archive is extensive. We have nearly 1000 square meters of archival facilities filled with film. The oldest film dates to 1897 (re-copied in the 1950s), and the most recent series recorded on film was made in 2011. In addition to this, we had a tape robot, which has now been decommissioned, and during an EU project, we migrated all tapes to low-resolution files. Once that project was completed, we launched the ‘Save the Films’ project with the goal of making the analog archive accessible.

We have over 500,000 hours of film, and initially we used a TeleCine scanner that ran the film in real-time – which would have taken us a lifetime to complete. Instead, we purchased scanners capable of scanning all material at five times the speed. Within five years, we had made 80% of the analog archive available in Full HD. However, there was demand for material in higher resolution and better audio capture, etc., so we invested in new scanners capable of scanning up to 4K and retired the old TeleCine scanner.

Now we have a MAM system filled with files in a mix of different formats and resolutions, and much of it does not meet today's technical standards. With the new scanners, we can rescan films up to 4K, but when the material was originally recorded on tape and has a resolution of only 576 pixels, the challenges are greater.

To help us, we have brought in an AI service that offers digital restoration and cleaning of files, upscaling from low resolution to high resolution, and colorization of black-and-white film.

David, a media technician, will share his experiences not only working with scanning but also supporting many major productions with colorization.

The digital age is burning out our most precious resources, and the future of the past is at stake. Cultural memory institutions such as libraries and archives have been manipulated in ways that prioritize technological efficiency over sustainable archival practices. This paper critically examines the embodied experiences of archivists in the digitization of sound archives, interrogating how the materiality of digital sound archives intersects with the pressing challenges of digitization, digital sustainability, and digital transformation.

While digital technologies have enabled unprecedented access to sound collections, they have also introduced systemic vulnerabilities, including the obsolescence of formats, reliance on extractive infrastructures, and the erasure of embodied archival knowledge. Through a post-phenomenological lens, this research highlights the materiality and sensory dimensions of digital sound archives embedded in the human-technology relations, revealing how archivists’ interactions with these collections shape digitization, preservation, and interpretation. This paper argues that digital sound archives require sustainable strategies that account for the labour, expertise, and sensory engagements embedded in their daily work.

Drawing on primary material collected from semi-structured interviews with archivists and sound engineers from fieldwork research supported by the British Library’s Unlocking Our Sound Heritage (UOSH) Project network, this study foregrounds the embodied labour of archivists as central to the future of cultural memory. In doing so, it calls for a re-imagining of digital sustainability—one that moves beyond technological determinism to recognize the human, material, and affective dimensions of digital sound preservation.

Discussions, regulations, and protocols to guide sustainable development in archives are often championed by professional associations and widely disseminated online, in-person meetings, and forums.  Many of these global standards, best practices, and green sustainable practices are easier to implement in technologically advanced countries and more challenging in those with unequal economies, political instability, long histories of colonization, and neocolonization. This paper calls attention to the need to move away from the convenient and homogeneous division of the global north / global south to understand specific contexts of sustainability work by audiovisual archives in Latin America and the Caribbean. The discussion focuses on research practices, recycling, and equipment repurposing as key aspects of promoting green archives. Illustrating specific examples of research leading to the fabrication of AD stripes, archival supplies, and adapting telecines to scanners yields a discussion of intrinsic characteristics of archival institutions to engender a more fair and informed dialogue with contemporary global efforts to foster and support green archives.

Archives have strived to digitise all their Quadruplex tapes before the format becomes completely obsolete due to lack of equipment and loss of skills. Despite their best efforts, many tapes remain locked in their vault, their content untouched, and the worldwide supply of spare parts and heads is quickly dwindling.

For archives engaging in digitising their remaining quadruplex tapes, many upended questions, with fewer people able to answer them, arise: Who still has the capacity to play back 2inch tapes? How to deal with the multiple sub-types and standards? What would be the cost and resources needed to embark in such a project? Can new digital tools compensate for lack of equipment?

This discussion panel, which aims to be the launching pad of further exchanges, will be led by experts (to be selected) from various backgrounds, such as archive institutions or service providers - all confronted to the challenge of quadruplex obsolescence in different ways.