FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2025

Slowly but steadily the podcast as a format gained more and more power as a dominant form of media. It is the way in which millions of people consume news, politics, entertainment and gossip on a daily basis. So since 2021 we’ve been actively working on preserving these audio stories that are created both by media professionals and hobbyists with a microphone on the kitchen table.

In this talk, we share key insights into how we’ve been archiving and preserving podcasts from the Netherlands for over four years. Why, after studying the distribution models of podcasts, we decided to ignore playback platforms like Apple Music or Spotify, but make use of a podcast RSS aggregator service instead. Using the Listennotes API, our script allows us to automatically gather podcasts in MP3 format together with any descriptive metadata that's included in the RSS feed by the podcaster creators. Simply adding new shows to a playlist enables us collect the latest episodes on a weekly basis. As we will walk you through our method, we go in-depth as to how we addepted MP3 as an accepted file format to ingest podcasts in our infrastructure, how we enrich episodes with additional metadata and make the shows accessible on our platforms to users. We explain our selection process using license agreements with creators and how we’re trying to get as wide of a vertical slice as possible of the Dutch podcasting landscape. Finally we address paywall related challenges that have become more frequent and that we are struggling with.This talk provides pointers that will allow anyone to get a grasp on how to preserve podcasts and make sure these stories can be told for generations to come.

Since the advent of the Internet mid 1990’s, free text search has been a central tool. First via indexes of online webpages in readable formats, then all sorts of digitized materials made searchable via OCR. However, written sources are by definition secondary sources, not least in relation to media archives. In this paper, we will demonstrate how the use of free sound search has been instrumental in two recent research projects on Danish music history, conducted at the Royal Danish Library.

The base is the tool xcorrSound. Via indexing of sound archives, it is possible to match sound files and perform searches into big amounts of data. Via a custom-built interface, the results are delivered in tables with relevant data, including a direct link to the file in the media archive and a custom-built media player, directly executing the files.

In this case, we used it to identify the use of specific songs in Danish radio and television from 1989 to 2020, indexed across the Danish media collections. From the data we could not only map airplay of specific songs year by year within minutes, but also analyze the contexts to a much higher degree than before. For instance, how a specific track was introduced or how the reception of a given song changes over time.

The tool has changed generally dark archives into vivid and rich resources for re-telling Danish media history. For now, the searches are performed track by track, but the perspectives of AI implementations are evident.

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.

Kelas Liarsip collective’s first project traces the work and life story of Indonesia’s pioneering woman film director Ratna Asmara (1913 - 1968). It was initiated with the support of public broadcasting platform for arts and culture Indonesiana TV.

This project expands the acknowledgement for women’s works in the moving image heritage. Since Indonesia’s publicly funded film heritage program was initiated in the form digitisation and restoration in 2014, only ONE work from women directors was included. Ratna Asmara’s ‘Dr. Samsi’ (1952), the subject of this research, is the second one.

The documented numbers of women directors remained below 2 percent within the moving image industry. This scarcity is very much reflected in the silences and absences in the archives. Due to lack of recognition, their works are left with minimal attention and care, leading to advanced chemical decay. The erasure of their traces progresses slowly and steadily over decades of limited civic spaces to research history - following decades of military regime’s censorship which is being revived by the country’s newly elected administration.

In this presentation, Kelas Liarsip will share a reflection of this collaborative project. Tracing Ratna Asmara provides a chance to question this erasure and explore methods of overcoming it. This research looks into the margins of established archives and searches through non-institutional sources. To study Asmara’s work approaches, Kelas Liarsip created digitisation and restoration workflows for 35mm film elements found in Jakarta, Indonesia. Acknowledging limitations of locally available technological resources, collaborative approaches were developed by moving image archivists and post-production technicians, mindfully using digital workflow in creating access copies and restoration. The process was documented in a series ‘Devising Ratna Asmara’ which was co-produced by Indonesiana TV, facilitating the assembly of a women-led creative team.

In her landmark speech on November 26, 1974, before an overwhelmingly male Assembly, Simone Veil, Minister of Health in the French Government, declared: “Just listen to women.” History has remembered this plea, but historiography has not always followed its guidance. Before the feminist voices of the 1970s and the passage of the 1975 law, there were the women who had abortions, those who performed them, and the intermediaries—nameless, faceless figures whose haunting, anxious, painful, liberating, or traumatic experiences had never been documented on this scale. 

To honor the significance of the Veil Law, INA (French National Audiovisual Institute) has created a landmark archival collection: 65 filmed testimonies gathered by a transdisciplinary and non-partisan committee led by historian Bibia Pavard. 

Those fragile yet essential testimonies—unprecedented in both scope and nature—form the foundation of a multi-platform and multi-format project ; Directed by Sonia Gonzalez, the documentary Il suffit d’écouter les femmes (Just Listen to Women) offers a chronological and thematic journey from 1955 to 1975, weaving together archival footage, songs, and fiction to bring these hidden stories to life.  Alongside the documentary, a book and podcast, offer a 360° exploration of abortion’s personal, historical, and societal dimensions.

Through these different lenses, the project sheds light on the lived experiences of abortion—moving from individual stories to broader historical and social perspectives—adding nuance and depth to contemporary public debates. 

Access to historical memory increasingly unfolds in digital spaces and it is crucial to make the exploration of the past intuitive and engaging. Online amateur footage— a phenomenal historical source offering a direct view of the past—can play a decisive role in this process. Our presentation will focus on these two topics:

1. The need for online platforms that engage non-specialist audiences

We’ve developed the concept of a large-scale audiovisual atlas that lets users explore space and time through audiovisual content. In a working prototype focused on Rome, we mapped each clip—sourced from both institutional archives and amateur online footage— to its exact filming location and time period on an interactive map. The result is a rich, immersive experience that allows:

• Low-threshold access: Users are drawn in by curiosity about specific places or moments, even without prior interest in archives.
• Playful interaction: Navigating the past becomes an exploratory act, akin to gameplay.
• Emotional resonance: Familiar places seen in unfamiliar times evoke memory and recognition. Such platforms have significant public value: they support a more authentic collective memory, counterbalancing fictional narratives with spontaneous, unmediated glimpses of the past.

2. The anthropological treasure of online amateur footage

Amateur digital videos—often shared informally online—played a crucial role in our prototype. They hold great historical and anthropological value because they:

• Show unfiltered, everyday behaviors;
• Document aspects of daily life rarely covered by professionals;
• Offer diverse perspectives and micro-histories.

By combining institutional and amateur footage, we gain a more complete, decentralized, and democratic view of reality. We argue that greater attention must be paid to the selection, preservation, and valorization of this often-overlooked material.