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 2025 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 Cardiff, Wales, in collaboration with BBC. This was the 12th instalment of the “Changing Sceneries, Changing Roles” Seminars, the theme being “AI and Human Collaboration: Partners in Archiving?”, focusing on media management, metadata, emerging and evolving technologies and changing skillsets.

The video recordings from the Media Management Seminar sessions are available on our website and YouTube channel.

Additionally, the MMC shared the results from the 2024 Timeline Survey and opened a new edition of the survey for this year, with the results to be shared at the FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2025 in Rome.

The Media Studies Commission (MSC) shared the papers from the 2023 and 2024 Media Studies Grant calls:

• Entangled Narratives of Restitution between Europe & Africa in Audiovisual Archives (2024) by Richard Legay, Arnold-Bergstraesser-Institut.
• Hide and Seek: Locating the Agency and Power of Archivists in the Neoliberalist Structures of Audio-Visual Archives in India (2024) by Dhara Shah and Abhishek Roy, Symbiosis International University.
• Collaborations Across Media in Socialist Romania: Researching One Institutional Archive in the Absence of Another (2023) by Adina Brădeanu, University of Oxford.
• From still to moving images and vice versa: Exploring creative ways of doing cinema and media history using AI (2023) by Beatriz Tadeo Fuica, IRCAV – Université Sorbonne Nouvelle.

The MSC also shared some articles related to the Media Studies Grant 2025 projects, including interviews, project outlines and findings from the archives. Proceedings from this year’s call will be shared by the end of the year with the FIAT/IFTA community.

Additionally, the MSC launched a Call for Papers for a special issue themed “Creative Dialogues with Broadcast Archives”. This special issue, featuring submissions by media academics, archivists, and visual artists, will be published in the VIEW Journal of European History and Culture in December 2025.

This year, the Preservation and Migration Commission (PMC) published the English and Spanish versions of the Guide to Quality Control for Migration Processes, providing guidelines for organisations and professionals who are planning or undertaking a migration project and hold responsibility for the quality of its outcome.

The PMC also hosted a free online seminar in June titled “Is this the last train for migration, and are we really sure of the destination?”, later publishing its recording and slides on the FIAT/IFTA website for everyone to access.

In 2025, the Value, Use and Copyright Commission (VUC) hosted two online Experts Roundtable Discussions — one focused on Generative AI and Audiovisual Archives, and the other on the Commercial Value of Archives.

The VUC also published a series of papers and articles on the FIAT/IFTA website:

• Under the #ArchivalReads section, two Rights & Risk case studies were released, featuring Rai and GBH Archives
• Under the new #AiPicks section — a dedicated space for content on this fast-evolving topic — two blog posts were published.