A tradition since 2012, the FIAT/IFTA ‘Where are you on the Timeline Survey’ annually measures where audiovisual archives managing broadcast collections are on their journey to become a fully digital archive. For the 2019 the organising FIAT/IFTA Media Management Commission (MMC) received a record of 102 answers, coming from 97 archives around the globe. Last Friday at the 2019 FIAT/IFTA World Conference in Dubrovnik, the results were presented by MMC members Eva-Lis Green and Adrienne Warburton.

Once again, the results of the survey provide meaningful insight in the constant transformation that television archives are in. For FIAT/IFTA the survey results are helpful to keep track of the challenges the members are confronted with. This way we provide you with relevant information on the FIAT/IFTA-website and during FIAT/IFTA events. Next to that, we inform international organizations as UNESCO on the state of audiovisual preservation in the world and the need for strong initiatives to preserve our unique audiovisual heritage. For the FIAT/IFTA members and other interested archives the results provide an answer on the question: ‘where is our archive on the timeline?’

The answers came from the following regions :

• Africa: 5.15%
• Asia: 10.31%
• Europe: 58.76%
• Latin America: 14.43%
• North America: 8.25%
• Oceania: 3.09%

 
A few conclusions from the 2019 results :

• 10% of respondents have completed the digitisation of their archive. 80% of these archives are situated in Europe.
• Almost 40% of all respondents now have between 75 and 100% of their archive on digital mass storage systems.
• For almost 20% of all respondents, the digitisation process has not yet or only just begun.
• 40% of all respondents is investigating the market of cloud storage. This is 10%-points more than in 2018 and 30%-points more than in 2017.
• The absolute number of archives that use automatic metadata creation methods in daily practice has increased to 11, coming from 7 in 2018.
• 50% of all the broadcasters who responded to the survey now have their own archival website. For the European broadcasters this is now 64%.

 
You can check out all the figures in the 2019 Timeline results presentation on the FIAT/IFTA Slideshare page.