FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2025

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.

The extensive audiovisual archives of Radio Televisión Española (RTVE) represent a rich, underutilized resource for production research. A particularly valuable yet challenging collection is the RTVE Film Archive, encompassing news programs from the 1950s to the late 1980s. While undergoing digitalization to improve accessibility, a significant portion of this news collection lacks accompanying sound and suffers from non-informative titles, hindering effective retrieval.

Our central research questions focus on how to effectively explore this news film collection for production needs, evaluate the performance of multimodal information retrieval technology in this context, and determine the feasibility and integration strategy of resulting metadata into the existing archive management system.

Focusing exclusively on non-textual, video-only content, we explore how to effectively represent video content in the absence of accompanying text or metadata by embedding both textual queries and video visual features into a shared vector space. This methodology utilizes the CLIP model to generate embeddings of video frames and natural language queries, constructing a multimodal semantic space where semantic similarity is measured by the proximity of representation vectors. The VTR system pipeline encompasses video analysis, semantic analysis, vector database ingestion, and search with relevance feedback, allowing users to query the film archive using natural language or example images.

The main contributions of this PoC include a demonstration of a functional VTR system for retrieving information from a film archive without relying on existing metadata, an evaluation of the effectiveness of joint semantic space representation for this task, and insights into the potential and challenges of integrating such technologies into existing media archive workflows.

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.

Digitisation is often seen as central to decolonising museums and archives by enhancing access and inclusion. However, many practices risk reproducing colonial structures by privileging institutional perspectives and erasing crucial contextual relationships. This project addresses such issues through the re-digitisation of archival materials from the 1947 expedition to Colombia, Panama, and Peru by the Ethnographic Museum of Gothenburg, confronting gaps and biases in earlier digitisation efforts.

We begin with a critical review of previous digitisation projects, revealing undocumented selection criteria, loss of context, and institutional bias. Using a decolonising toolkit focused on reflexivity, transparency, and contextual integrity, we aim to re-digitise three photo albums from the expedition, preserving their original structure while integrating related, previously overlooked materials such as travel journals, correspondence, and financial records. This approach reconnects visual and textual sources to offer a more layered narrative.

Our method aligns with records-continuum theories, which challenge colonial provenance and advocate for concepts such as parallel provenance, archival multiverse, and critical reflexivity. These frameworks expose how archives shape historical narratives and highlight the colonial roots of many museum collections.Through the application of these tools, frequently guided by developments in AI, our goal is to decolonise and open the archive to multiple perspectives.

Through comparison with earlier digitisation efforts, we show how decolonising methods can reshape archival practices, fostering more equitable, transparent, and adaptive workflows that resist colonial legacies and support future reinterpretation.

Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I) is a 2000 French documentary film directed by Agnès Varda. The film addresses themes like social inequality, dignity and resilience, food waste, and sustainability, making it resonate with contemporary issues. It delves into various forms of gleaning, the practice of collecting leftover crops from fields after the harvest. Shot with a handheld digital camera, it captures intimate and spontaneous moments, featuring unique visual elements such as heart-shaped potatoes.

Twenty-five years after its initial release, l’Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA) and Ciné-Tamaris, the distribution company for the works of Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy, are offering students worldwide a unique opportunity to explore Varda's work. Leveraging INA's expertise in preserving, describing, and providing access to heritage collections, all the raw footage from The Gleaners and I is now available online. This comprehensive resource includes the edited film, separate audio tracks, and a pedagogical kit with photographs and press releases. Students can explore and use this raw material to create their own versions of the film and study Varda's editing techniques.

By making the documentary’s rushes available, Ciné-Tamaris and INA continue the educational mission initiated by Agnès Varda herself. This project not only preserves an exceptional piece of cinematic heritage but also fosters a new generation of filmmakers and scholars, encouraging them to engage deeply with Varda's innovative approach to documentary filmmaking.