FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2025

The presentation explores the comprehensive archiving and publication processes of Yle's program content, with a particular focus on factual programming. It emphasizes three key areas: archiving program content, republishing or reuse, and the ethical and moral considerations surrounding programs published indefinitely on Yle's online streaming service, Yle Areena.

Initially, the focus will be on the AV archive database designed for Yle's internal use. The primary questions center on journalistic and cultural perspectives, as well as Finnish law, which guide the long-term preservation of Yle's programs. We will examine who can access the archive database and under what conditions, while considering the significance of maintaining the authenticity of archived programs and the conditions under which they may be altered.

Next, we will explore the principles behind republishing archive programs. Publication decisions consider legal, ethical, and journalistic guidelines, with particular attention to personal stories and sensitive topics. We will assess whether such publications require additional conceptualization, such as an accompanying editorial article or at least a note in the program's description. For instance, expressions and behaviors that were accepted in the past are evaluated within the context of today's society, with historical background information provided when necessary to enhance understanding.

Finally, we will explore the principles related to the modification or removal of published archive programs from Yle Areena. Ethical considerations, including privacy and freedom of speech, play a crucial role in these decisions. Additionally, we will detail the responsibilities of the editor in charge when handling requests to remove videos from the online platform.

The Archives of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) is cultural heritage and should be available to the Norwegian public. Open archives are an important democratic principle and tell us about our societal development, who we used to be, and who we are today. We call our archive Norway’s diary.

We have over 240,000 unique programs on our streaming platform NRK TV. But how does all our content hold up for modern viewers?

Archive content needs context. We have experienced that time works both for and against us: what was once acceptable may be perceived differently today. At the same time, things that were very difficult many years ago may be completely unproblematic today.

NRKs rule is as follows: NRK shall have a low threshold for publishing content, a high threshold for removing it – and the content we curate, we curate for a contemporary audience.

In the process of publishing the archive we had many discussions and different solutions. In our presentation we will show a wide range of cases of how NRK considers ethics when making the past accessible.

We're going to talk about how we handle our skeletons in the closet.

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.

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.

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.

Amid a global trend for open access to public archives, this study introduces a national initiative to create a digital platform for accessing government-produced audiovisual content held by Korea’s Public Policy Broadcasting Service (KTV). These materials—ranging from public information films to coverage of national events—offer significant historical and cultural value for civic engagement, education, and creative reuse.

The research evaluates South Korea’s evolving digital archive environment, focusing on institutional, technological, and policy strategies to improve public access. It critically analyzes current platforms, such as the KTV NaNuri portal and e-History, identifying limitations in metadata infrastructure, content quality, and user interaction. Drawing on global archival practices and AI applications, the study proposes a roadmap for innovation.

Key recommendations include AI-based metadata enhancement, a dual-track service model for general and institutional users, and phased content release aligned with social demand across sectors such as education, research, media, and cultural institutions (GLAM). Legislative and institutional reforms are also addressed to overcome regulatory and rights-related barriers.

The project concludes with a strategic plan (2026–2028) to foster interagency collaboration and build a sustainable, AI-driven infrastructure for public access. This presentation contributes to international discourse on audiovisual heritage and showcases South Korea’s approach to opening its government media archives for broader public use.

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.

This presentation explores experimental machine learning techniques in film restoration, focusing on the development of small custom trained AI models tailored to the needs of archival materials. Unlike commercial AI tools optimized for contemporary media, these models are designed specifically to address the unique forms of degradation found in historical film elements. By working with localized datasets and film specific characteristics, the approach avoids overgeneralization and preserves the distinct aesthetics of the original material.

The presentation covers restoration tasks such as color recovery, either guided by reference materials (such as prints, internegatives, or digitized analog elements) or inferred from culturally or artistically analogous sources when references are unavailable, and spatial repair techniques including gauge alignment, generational recovery, and analog video reconstruction.

Emphasis is placed on ethical considerations, particularly the use of locally executed models trained only on authorized data, thereby respecting rights and provenance while ensuring archival transparency. This work argues for a shift toward practical and ethically sourced AI tools that empower archives to perform restoration work at scale without compromising historical integrity or legal clarity.

This project explores how Italian public television has constructed the figure of the "foreigner" – colonized subject, migrant, refugee, the "other" – through the lens of the RAI audiovisual archive. The investigation focuses on a curated selection of programs and archival footage from the 1950s to the present, analyzing the evolution of language, imagery, and narrative frames linked to otherness. In the absence of television material from the colonial era, the project examines how that historical experience has been portrayed retrospectively, shedding light on how public broadcasting has either restored or erased its memory. From this starting point, the analysis moves through narratives of internal migration, immigration flows from the 1980s onward, and evolving discourses around multiculturalism, national identity, and public security.

The aim is to show how the audiovisual archive functions not only as a repository of public memory, but also as an active agent in shaping cultural categories and hierarchies. In an information-saturated world, still dominated by polarized discourse, revisiting the archival past becomes a way to reflect critically on its responsibilities in the present. Particular attention will be devoted to the language used in TV programs, highlighting how expressions such as vu cumprà (a derogatory term for migrant street vendors), extracomunitario (a bureaucratic term for non-EU foreigners, often used pejoratively), and maranza (slang for a working-class youth with stereotyped behavior and style, sometimes racialized) have helped shape a distorted and often stigmatizing imaginary. Through this focus on vocabulary and visual rhetoric, the project contributes to the broader debate on the public role of broadcast archives, not only as tools for historical inquiry, but as critical spaces for understanding the continuities and fractures in representations of the other, and for exploring the complex relationship between media, society, and alterity.

On both shores of the Mediterranean, Tunisia and Italy have a shared past. Waves of migration have followed one another for centuries between the two shores, leading to the settlement of the Italian community in Tunisia.

Migration and integration have accompanied the trajectory of Italians in Tunisia, we propose through this multi-media audiovisual and written research to present the evidence provided by the archives on the Italian-Tunisian heritage, this archive search concerned the archives of Tunisian Television, namely the two collections of television programs from the 80s “Italiet” and “Sikiliet”, on Italy and Sicily as web as the two seasons of the Ramadan soap opera “harga” from the years 2021-2022.

We also used written references from the Tunisian National Archives and the National Library, as well as online resources and books written by Italian researchers with a migratory past from the cities of Livorno, Tuscany, Sicily, and Genoa.

This research is essential for tracing the contemporary history of Tunisia and Italy, of the Italians who remained in Tunisia since its independence in 1956.

It is essential to represent the cultural framework of Italian migrants and the framework of the professions practiced in Tunisia, as well as the impact of their integration into Tunisian culture in search of a shared Mediterranean identity.

Resources:
- Tunisian Television Archives
- Archives of the National Archives of Tunisia
- Archives of the National Library
- Online Resources

Since 1959 the Netherlands have been sourcing natural Gas through a company (NAM) from under the feet of the people of Groningen. This has been a success story for more than 50 years. Working in the Natural Gas Industry was something to be proud of.

Then came the earthquakes. In the province of Groningen people started seeing cracks in their homes. It took years to get the Dutch government and the NAM to acknowledge the root cause of the problem, the mining of natural Gas.
The government decided to handle the situation, but nothing much happened. The inhabitants of Groningen that were effected sometimes had to leave their home for years.

In short, the government failed their people as was acknowledged: Between 2021 and 2023, the Dutch House of Representatives conducted a parliamentary survey on the extraction of natural gas in the Groningen field and the long-term problems that resulted from this. The aim of this survey was to gain insight into the decision-making process on natural gas extraction, earthquakes, damage handling and reinforcement.

The Groningen Archives (Groninger Archieven) has made it company policy to document everything about the mining of Natural Gas, the good years and the bad.

We have hundreds of 16mm films of the early years of Gasunie (an energy network operator. In the Netherlands. We also preserve oral history interviews. The interviews reflect the early years as well as the end years of this period. The interviews are conducted by a foundation, Ooggetuigen van de geschiedenis (Eye witnesses of history).

We were an advising party, as well as the preserving and publicising party. We want the stories of the people to be part of this archive, researchable online, and we think that we can add to truth finding and our work can help relieve the trauma of the effected people by letting them be part of the archive. Actual people with a voice and a story.

The talk will be about our future plans and idea’s for an inclusive approach to archiving.

This presentation focuses on a significant initiative undertaken by the Royal Danish Library in response to the Danish Media Agreement (2023-2026), aimed at enhancing public access to the archives of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR). The purpose of this project is to empower Danish citizens to explore their shared history and gain insight into the events that have shaped their society.

Pivotal to the project is the establishment of a licensing agreement with the rights holders to facilitate public access to the content. Another key component of the initiative is the development of a user-friendly access platform for the DR archive, designed to allow users to search and access content without requiring login credentials. The effort includes enriching metadata to address the needs of users while ensuring compliance with legal standards. The project also entails processing DR's extensive audio and video collection spanning from 1931 to 2025, making broadcasts identifiable and accessible through segmentation and metadata enrichment processes.

To achieve these objectives, the project employs agile methodologies and integrates user experience (UX) design techniques, including focus groups and user journey mapping, to create an intuitive interface that enhances user engagement.

Ultimately, this initiative aims to preserve and provide access to DR's invaluable content, reinforcing the democratic foundation of society by ensuring equitable access to cultural heritage. This aligns with the Royal Danish Library's commitment to fostering a democratic and informed knowledge society, making this presentation a vital contribution to discussions on digital accessibility and cultural preservation.