FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2025

Published in April 2025 after 2 years in the making, The Guide to Quality Control in Migration Processes (short: the Quality Guide) is a comprehensive document that aims at describing all quality arrangements that make for a successful migration project, from preparation of legacy carriers to long-term digital preservation. It is intended as a help for anyone dealing with migration of audiovisual content.

This session will provide an overview of what is found in this guide, how it can be of use, and by whom.

The spectre of obsolescence has been looming over audiovisual archives for many years, but is the end really imminent? Does it apply to all types of legacy formats? How can we objectively measure its progression and anticipate its impact? Does the problem end when everything turns to digital files?

The Preservation and Migration Commission of FIAT/IFTA organised an online seminar in June 2025 with the slightly provocative title "Is this the last train for migration?".

This session marks an opportunity to delve further into the subject by confronting the points of view of all parties involved, including archive owners, service providers and equipment manufacturers.

In RAI's massive digitisation of Betacam and IMX tapes, Quality Control was set up since the beginning to ensure the best possible result.  

However, QC activity must necessarily adapt to the required pace. Since the original carriers were retained for potential re-digitisation in case issues are later found with the digitised content, QC could tolerate a certain error rate, as errors would not be irreparable.

Over time it became clear that accessing again the original carriers is not viable, in addition to the fact that the players will not be available much longer than the digitisation process itself.

Quality of legacy content can be low for plenty of reasons: the original recording, past format migration, carrier deterioration and, finally, digitisation.

We decided to run a retrospective QC activity, on a representative sample basis, for assessing, with a different QC methodology, if quality lower than acceptable, due to specific criticalities, was not detected.

Retrospective QC is a means to obtain statistical knowledge about the results of digitisation so far. Knowledge useful for assigning value to the digitised content, making decisions about the original carriers, and evaluating how to proceed with ongoing digitisation.

A few aspects are worthy of attention. Retrospective QC was done having as input the same information that was available to QC operators, but viewing the whole content timeline, at maximum double speed. Provenance, together with year and context of production, were considered for assessing content quality. The quality of digitisation has been rated as either bad, low, acceptable, good, or very good, with only the first two levels requiring a retry of digitisation. This is because minor or short issues can be addressed through intervention on digital content at repurposing time.

The original acceptance decision was found correct for 98,7% of the sample. It’s a success, we are going to explain why.

For audiovisual archives, the need to digitize magnetic media is urgent and immense. This urgency is driven not only by the physical degradation of tapes but also by the rapid disappearance of the equipment, spare parts, and technical knowledge required to play them back. Unlike film, which benefits from ongoing scanner development, videotape formats rely entirely on fragile, aging machines—many of which are no longer manufactured, increasingly difficult to maintain, and often irreplaceable. Without these tools—and the expertise to use them—segments of audiovisual heritage risk becoming permanently inaccessible. The window for mass digitization is closing.

This presentation explores the tension between mission and means in addressing this challenge. While broadcasters have often led the way in digitization and still face significant backlogs, the remaining analog collections extend far beyond this sector (including performing arts institutions, universities, government agencies, and local archives). The Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision faces a difficult decision: whether to invest in preserving and operating a vast fleet of legacy video playback equipment, originally held by a private digitization partner at risk of dissolution.

We examine the rationale behind this proposed acquisition—not only as a response to shrinking digitization capacity but also as a symbolic affirmation of institutional responsibility. At the same time, the financial sustainability of this move remains uncertain. Will enough collections be offered for digitization in the coming decades to justify the cost? Can such infrastructure serve both the institution’s own needs and those of the broader field?

Ultimately, this presentation reflects on what it means for a public institution to act as a steward—not just of content but of the tools required to access it. It poses the question: if archives like ours don’t act, who will? And what happens if we don’t?

Over the past 10 to 15 years, the field of digital preservation has expanded significantly, bringing with it a growing need for certification of trusted digital repositories. The OAIS model (ISO 14721) has become a foundational standard, leading to certification frameworks such as Trusted Digital Repository (ISO 16363), Germany’s DIN 31646, and the CoreTrustSeal (CTS, NL), formerly known as the Data Seal of Approval (DSA). A few audiovisual archives – such as Sound and Vision (NL) and NCAA (India) – have already completed certification, and others, like meemoo (BE), are in progress. Notably, no archive managed directly by a broadcaster has yet achieved such certification.

Article 33 of the Swiss Ordinance on Public Broadcasting mandates that “archiving is carried out […] according to recognised professional standards.” In response, RSI (the public broadcaster of Italian-speaking Switzerland) has launched a self-audit based on the Flemish-Dutch ScoreModel for Digital Sustainability, which is aligned with CTS criteria. The goal is to eventually undergo a full audit and, if feasible, obtain certification.

This process, however, has highlighted several challenges: current standards are not designed with broadcast archives in mind. Even within the audiovisual field, applying certain criteria requires contextual interpretation and adaptation.

This presentation outlines RSI’s journey from initial motivation to current status, reflecting on the common difficulties in interpreting and meeting certification standards. It also advocates for developing a tailored standard that supports – rather than limits – the long-term digital sustainability of in-house broadcaster archives, reflecting their specific realities and operational contexts.

As a result of the SAFE – Sustainability of Italian Film Heritage project (2022-2025), this poster will provide insights into the outputs collected from a national survey of practices and strategies for non-theatrical film heritage in Italy. The SAFE project analyzed the current state of film archiving through three research axes: storage infrastructures, digital preservation practices, and stewardship strategies.

Submitted in early spring 2025, this survey investigates several crucial topics related to sustainable film archiving practices, such as long-term analog and digital storage, labor organization, funding, and environmental accountability. The expected results of this research are twofold: first, it allows a clear and in-depth overview of the current state of preservation of non-theatrical film heritage, and second, it provides a timeline for archival organizations to anticipate the foreseeable future of preservation practices. In the last decades, alongside the more established cineteche and film archives, the field of Italian film heritage has acknowledged the rapid development and emergence of organizations dedicated to non-theatrical heritage (including home movies, political films, and industrial or scientific audiovisual production).

In this presentation, we will make available the main outputs of the quantitative and qualitative research that involved several key film heritage organizations, completed by field interviews, through a still poster including aggregated data visualization of the study. We also plan to provide an interactive data restitution of the survey results using tablets allowing cross-checked research to have a better understanding of the current state of sustainability of Italian film heritage.