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.

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB), a collaboration between the Library of Congress and GBH Archives, goals are to preserve and make accessible material created for American public tv and radio such as voices, culture, and news from communities across the country.  The AAPB fortunately has had funding to support the growth and outreach of the collection, in addition to creating AI tools to help generate metadata.  With US federal funding sources shutting down, the future of support for public media archives in the US is limited.  How do we continue to support the needed staff, the contributors to the AAPB, and be responsible to the historic record?

The GBH Archives, in addition to the AAPB collaboration, is responsible for the preservation and access of the materials created by GBH, the public broadcasting station in Boston that provides over 30% of the content for the US public media system (PBS). GBH Archives website Open Vault provides access to GBH materials and is also facing funding cuts.

GBH Archives has had success with social media outreach, building a following, and licensing of GBH materials.
Highlighting the use of the collection by scholars, journalists, filmmakers, educators, and the public should support the value of the work. Licensing footage brings some revenue, but not enough to support the whole preservation and access ecosystem. The AAPB has been using non generative of AI tools to help create metadata to increase discoverability within the growing collection. Interest in the use of the collection to train tools, as a dataset, could be licensable, but what are the ethics and rights issues in allowing that? Identifying faces, or voices, raises concern. AAPB will share outreach work, the value of making content accessible (even if it might not be dollars), and some stories from the field.

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.

The growing reliance on artificial intelligence technologies in film archiving has raised increasing concerns regarding the neutrality of these systems: particularly in representing non-Western productions. Global tools such as Google Cloud Video Intelligence and Amazon Transcribe are commonly used in audiovisual archiving; however, their linguistic and cultural training raises questions about their ability to accurately represent Arab films.

Although advancements in Arabic language processing have improved AI’s capacity to interpret Arabic content, challenges remain. These systems may still reproduce algorithmic biases stemming from unbalanced training data or design assumptions. Furthermore, the complexity of the Arabic language, especially its dialectal and cultural diversity, continues to pose unresolved technical and archival obstacles. This gap has yet to be systematically studied through comparative analysis with specialized Arabic-language AI models. If unaddressed, the integration of such global technologies into Arab film archives risks producing digital repositories that misclassify or marginalize local narratives, thereby distorting cinematic memory.

This research proposes an applied analytical study to examine the potential bias of global smart archiving systems toward Arab films. It evaluates the performance of Google Cloud Video Intelligence and Amazon Transcribe, comparing their results to those of specialized Arabic AI models. The study also explores the potential for integrating Arabic models via a dedicated API to enhance the performance of global systems and proposes practical solutions to foster a more inclusive Arab digital film archive.

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.

In 2023 the BBC Archive Curation Team was established with a new remit to ‘Maximise the value of the archive through the re-use, re-purposing and re-imagining of Our Collections’. This new approach has required us to consider how to use our existing skills while developing new ones.

In this presentation I will talk about how the BBC Archive has evolved over the last 20 years to a Digital First model, and the impact this has had on our mission, structure and job roles. I will share how we have defined and launched an Archive Curation Strategy, with an emphasis on the skills we are developing in our teams through our Curation Training Programme. I will explore the broad remit of the Curation Team at the BBC, and look at both the challenges and successes we have enjoyed in our first 2 years.

Finally, I will end with a look to the next steps for the Curation Team as the strategy and approach becomes established, and we being to investigate the opportunities offered by advances in tools and technologies.

The increasing demand for engaging cost-effective content within the television industry has catalyzed a paradigm shift in how archival materials are utilized. This project explores the transformative potential of archive-based content production in the Focus thematic television channel, within the TV schedule of Mediaset— the leading commercial television in Italy. By leveraging previously unused and mostly unknown archive footage, particularly raw and semi-edited materials, the project demonstrates how these resources can be reimagined to create fresh, relevant television programming while conserving both financial and creative resources.

Central to this initiative is the collaboration between the Mediaset Archives and Media Management department (archivists/researchers and video-editors) and the Production and Editorial departments of Focus TV, who work together to unlock the hidden value of audiovisual archives.

The process begins with a creative ideation phase, where new concepts are developed in line with Focus TV's strategic objectives and audience expectations. Archival unseen footage is then carefully scouted and evaluated for reuse, with a legal framework in place to ensure the appropriate rights and permissions for each asset. The next steps involve the crafting of the narrative, writing of scripts, and the post-production stages, culminating in the final broadcast.

By reusing and reinventing archival materials, the project not only breathes new life into the audiovisual heritage of the network but also contributes to the preservation and strategic value of archival assets. This process demonstrates the evolving role of the archivist, not simply as a custodian of materials, but as a key player in the editorial and creative processes.

The potential of the project extends beyond the creation of new content. The use of AI-powered documentation tools such as speech-to-text and speech recognition enhances the searchability and accessibility of archived materials, making them easier to retrieve for future projects. Furthermore, the project opens up new opportunities for collaboration with other TV channels to promote the reuse of archival materials, fostering a broader exchange of audiovisual resources within the industry.

This case study highlights the value of audiovisual archives as a strategic, creative asset, and showcases how the cyclical reuse of archival content—within the context of circular media economies—can result in innovative, cost-efficient productions. Furthermore, this project is a testament to the critical role that also private commercial television archives, such as those of Mediaset, can play in shaping the future of content production, proving that even commercially-driven networks can innovate and enhance the value of their archival assets in the global media landscape.

This presentation explores the evolution of video and audio production utilizing archive footage at ORF, tracing three decades of innovation and creative programming. Initially, the ORF Archives production teams focused on creating cost-effective programs solely from existing archive material. Over time, their role expanded as they began collaborating with various editorial departments, integrating new footage into their projects. This collaboration has fostered a comprehensive understanding of production workflows, resulting in mutual benefits for both the archive team and the broader organization.

The transition from archive researcher to archive journalist has necessitated the acquisition of new skills and ongoing training, marking a significant shift in the team's capabilities. This presentation is illustrated through numerous video examples that demonstrate the enhancement in quality and creativity of the programs produced, culminating in tri-medial broadcasting.

A highlight of the ORF-archive is the program “From the Archives,” which features live audiences and live web streaming since its inception in 2011. Archive journalist Regina Nassiri, the creative force of the show, curates and presents the program, welcoming celebrities from stage and screen. The upcoming edition in June 2025 commemorates the 70th anniversary of ORF television, further solidifying Nassiri's status as a celebrated figure in her own right.
This presentation will also address the legal aspects, the advantages and challenges of programs based on archive content and give insights into future projects - an AV-archive must look in both directions: not only to preserve the past but also to look into the future.

By providing a wealth of examples this presentation may inspire other audio-visual archives in their creative endeavors.

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.

Long before TikTok, Instagram and selfies, community-scale media-making narrated decades of everyday history on the Greek islands. Amateur filmmakers captured fleeting moments of public and private life, while public access television stations provided a platform for local news, events and creative expression. This parallel session presents the amateur video and broadcast archive of Aigaio TV, a regional public-access television station headquartered in Syros island, Greece functioning between 1988-2009.

Specifically, the session presents methodologies for community based documentation and access of audiovisual material developed during the 2024 edition of APEX, the Audiovisual Preservation Exchange program originating from the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program at the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. In collaboration with Archipelago Network, a Greece-based nonprofit organization for research and documentation of audiovisual heritage and knowledge in the Aegean region, selected archivists, NYU MIAP Professors and MIAP students worked to exchange knowledge and skills regarding the care of audiovisual materials, cataloging, metadata management, digitization, digital preservation, and access to collections.

Today, accelerating forces such as overtourism and the global climate crisis exert local pressures on the island communities of the Aegean, threatening their cultural heritage and environmental equilibriums. The Aigaio TV archive, which includes broadcasts covering 30 years of Syros island’s history, contains invaluable documentation of current events, political life and society. Collaborative models for cataloging developed over the course of APEX, as well as public screenings organized subsequently with the local community as a form of documenting anonymous/orphan material, provide models for reinterpreting these materials through a contemporary lens and providing access for younger generations of islanders.

In my presentation I aim to understand how discourses, sentiments, attitudes and behaviours reminiscent of the historical past take centre stage in the present. Drawing upon current media portrayals on the rise of far-right politics in the Romania, I investigate how archived television pasts can offer orientations amidst present-day phenomena such as populism, polarization and disinformation, questioning thus the roles and nature of archives as simultaneously technologies of the past, present and future.

Starting from the premise that present-day medial portrayals act as ‘repositories of memory’ (Stoler, 2009, p. 49), I will zoom into several instances of recent media portrayals in Romania that reflect both present-day sentiments in the country as well as reference Romania’s historical past. These media portrayals will form the focus of a feminist approach to archival curation (DWAN, 2017). Feminist-inspired archival curation aims to generate new approaches to engaging with existing archives in ways that connect historical archives with present-day political contexts and in doing so, create new archival forms and reimagine existing archival structures. As part of this feminist curatorial exercise, I will place the selected instances of audiovisual media in conversation with historical archival documents on Romania’s televisual past, so as to arrive at arrive at gaps, omissions and silences in archived historical narratives that are still palpable in the present day.

Using a method that historian Saidiya Hartman (2019) calls ‘critical fabulation’, I aim to open up the potentialities of archival knowledge and provide a demonstrative show-and-tell of what a reconfiguration of archives as technologies of the past may look like and what new imaginaries are prompted through that exercise of reconfiguration.

Rithy Panh’s Meeting with Pol Pot (2024) revisits the haunting Khmer Rouge leader, often in shadow, re-engaging the regime's propaganda archives. This presentation draws from postdoctoral research analyzing mise-en-scène as a method to investigate staging, ideology, and hidden violence within these official films (1975-1979), largely held at the Bophana Center in Cambodia. Our project develops the methodology "recomposition of mise-en-scène", confronting archival images with extra-filmic sources to critically reread intended meanings and reveal internal tensions.

Focusing on leadership representation, this paper examines Pol Pot’s portrayal in the propaganda corpus. Contrary to pervasive collective labor images, Pol Pot and high-ranking officials are selectively present. When appearing (e.g., Défilé militaire khmer rouge, Meeting khmer rouge au stade), the mise-en-scène builds rigid hierarchy, visually separating leaders from populace and emphasizing military power. Official visit images (e.g., Visite de la délégation chinoise et laotienne) depict controlled environments and hint at privileges (palaces, cars, banquets) starkly contrasting with the enforced austerity of the population.

Our analysis articulates these filmic constructions with extra-filmic materials: historiography gives context; regime slogans and Pol Pot’s speeches reveal ideological contradictions (such as demanding sacrifice under the sun while using a fan himself); crucially, victim testimonies about forced labor allow perceiving subtle details in the images – fleeting expressions, exhausted bodies – challenging the regime's monolithic narrative of revolutionary fervor and exposing violence masked by the propaganda’s heroic facade. This approach offers cautionary tales from authoritarian archives about visual regimes disciplining history and bodies, insights crucial for navigating complex realities past and present.

In this paper I will investigate the role of the hit parade in Europe with special emphasis on the inclusion of the format within national public service broadcasting from late 1950’s and forth. Using the Danish case as my point of departure, I will demonstrate how the hit parade was an important element in relation to a number of processes taking place simultaneously across Europe:

• A general process of internationalization/anglophonization of popular music (a process also often labeled Americanization)
• A counteractive process of nationalization of popular music (charts for regional music)
• A general turn towards a more populist approach to national public service broadcasting
• The constitution of an international youth music/culture

The hit parade (also called “radio charts”) is a radio show format based on a ranking of music, mostly either based on votes, sales reports or airplay statistics. The format, originating in USA in mid-1930s, was imported to Europe during World War II through American Forces Network and similar radio services for the allied forces stationed across Europe. Until late 1950’s and early 1960s hit parades were primarily presented on either these or commercial stations (Radio Luxembourg, off shore stations).

The history of the Hit Parade provides a remarkable foundation for studying how public service institutions have navigated the enduring balance between populism and idealism over time. Generally, the hit parade did not meet the criteria formulated and executed within the scheme of traditional interpretations of public service broadcasting. Several early examples are found around Europe, but the format did not find roots within national broadcasting until late 1959. From then on hit parades started popping up on national stations, partly as a response to competition from commercial radio, but also as an instrument to reach a specific target group, the teenagers.