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.