The World Day for Audiovisual Heritage – 27 October – is a key initiative for both UNESCO and the Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Associations (CCAAA) to honour audiovisual preservation professionals and institutions that safeguard our heritage for future generations. Around the world, audiovisual archives join together annually on this day to celebrate their work with events that highlight the vulnerability of these valuable materials and celebrate the often unheralded work of the institutions that provide protection and preservation, ensuring their availability in the future.

Audiovisual materials can tell your story, your truth, and your presence. They provide a window to the world, allowing us to observe events we cannot attend, hear voices from the past who can no longer speak, and craft stories that inform and entertain. By listening to recorded sounds and looking at images captured on film and video, we can appreciate the richness of this culture and learn from it.

To celebrate the 2023 World Day of Audiovisual Heritage, FIAT/IFTA is highlighting this year’s activities of our four commissions.

The Media Management Commission (MMC) hosted its bi-annual seminar in Dublin, Ireland, in collaboration with RTÉ and Comisiún na Meán and with the support of TG4. This was the 11th instalment of the “Changing Sceneries, Changing Roles” Seminars, the theme being “Digital Transformation, Sustainability and Media Archives: Challenges and Opportunities, focusing on media management, metadata, rights, new emerging technologies and changing skillsets.

New video recordings from the Media Management Seminar sessions will be shared every Thursday on the FIAT/IFTA website from Thursday, November 9th.

The Media Studies Commission (MSC) shared the two papers from the 2022 Media Studies Grant call:

• Broadcasting UK Feminist Video: Mapping Local Histories and Transnational Networks of the 1980s in the BFI Archive by Dalila Missero, Lancaster University.
• How Music Shapes the News: A Postcolonial Look at Polygoon Newsreels, 1930-87 by Emily Hansell Clark, University of Amsterdam.

The proceedings from this year’s call will be shared in 2023 with the FIAT/IFTA community.

The MSC, in collaboration with the BFI, is hosting the 3rd edition of the Media Studies Seminar in London, United Kingdom, this Friday, December 8th. You will be able to attend this seminar for free, with more information on the event coming soon.

This year, the Preservation and Migration Commission (PMC) published the Spanish version of their Outsourced Migration Guide, providing guidelines for the Latin American community on a relevant topic in the region.

The PMC also hosted a free online seminar in June on the topic of the Preservation Life Cycle, later publishing its recording and slides on the FIAT/IFTA website for everyone to access.

In 2023, the Value, Use and Copyright Commission (VUC) published three papers on the FIAT/IFTA website:

• How far are you willing to open? A Rai survey on disclosing archives to the world.
• Guide to Managing Rights and Risks in Audiovisual Archives: A Value, Use and Copyright Commission report.
• Beyond Search: Exploring Creative Approaches to Interfacing with Cultural Heritage Collections (A Case Study Analysis): a collaboration from the VUC with AVRA and the researcher Nadia Piet.