The project involves the migration, preservation and of making digitally accessible the RTÉ radio production recordings and music collections, spanning over 80 years of 20th Century Broadcast history from the 1920s to the early 2000s. The recordings encompass the full range of broadcasting genres across current affairs, cultural events, news, sport, drama, educational and concerts. Recordings are in both the Irish and English Languages and are bound to the format of reel-to-reel quarter-inch audio tape and optical disk carriers.

The volume of material is significant in both scale and complexity. There are more than 200,000 objects in a variety of artificial, natural, and organic materials weighing 80 tons when piled up, and which can stretch over 40,000 km when unspooled, amounting to 270 terabytes of binary digits once digitised and showcases the achievement of moving such volumes into a new era of content consumption and memory storage solutions.

For this massive migration project, RTÉ relied strongly on collaboration, first by seeking guidance from international archive organizations and communities, then by getting many internal departments involved in the project, and finally by establishing a solid partnership with the service provider in charge of the migration.

The project makes good use of legacy ancillary data, with an ambition to generate even more through the implementation of transcription tools adapted to the detection of Irish dialects, enabling better discoverability of the content.

Although RTVE’s archives have been digitised as technological evolution has allowed it, an important part of the Documentary Funds of RTVE’s Regional Delegations, which are those that comprise its territorial structure, remain undigitised.

This project deals with the digitisation of all the contents in Betacam video format of fourteen Regional Delegations from 1988 to 2014, the year in which the Delegations began to work in a centralised digital newsroom with digital archives. The project consists of two parts:

1. Telefónica Servicios Audiovisuales, selected by RTVE in a public tender in collaboration with Memnon, will be responsible for digitising some 205,000 videotapes over a period of three years and incorporating this digitised content into the current Documentary Collection system.
2. The Systems Department, an area belonging to RTVE, has implemented a solution using virtual pointers to associate this newly digitised media with all the documents (data) of the Regional Delegations previously archived in the corporate document manager, “ARCA”, prior to their digitisation.

It is essential to undertake this project:

• as the videotapes are beginning to reach the limit of their useful life, and in this way, the deterioration of the funds will be avoided, and the obligation to watch over the preservation of the historical audiovisual archives that the state-owned Corporación RTVE has been entrusted with will be fulfilled.
• It will facilitate the access and dissemination of this territorial information, now scattered all over the country, thus fulfilling, at regional and local levels, RTVE’s obligation to broadcast the audiovisual production of social and cultural interest.
• It will result in greater efficiency in production, in the immediacy of the information, in the greater documentary richness of the contents and in higher quality territorial information, as the Delegations, from their digital newsroom, demand digital materials every day to produce new content.
• It will make it possible to apply Artificial Intelligence techniques to all this content, such as voice transcription or automatic indexing. This will facilitate the search for materials that will now have new access points.
• And finally, this project will mean significant savings in space and maintenance costs for materials with demanding conservation conditions.

One of the big challenges in TVE’s project is successfully implementing a common process into its 14 regional delegations to make sure that exchanges between each of them and the service provider in charge of migration operations run smoothly.

Particular effort was put into linking the newly generated video files with pre-existing metadata in TVE’s MAM system for immediate visibility of the content once the migration is done.

Quick and easy access by TVE’s production teams implies increased content value, even if the source format itself is not fully preserved.

“How Sexism Shaped Our Teenage Years” is an interactive project that portrays the symbolic violence towards women during those formative years in which human beings are shaping their personalities and are particularly vulnerable to this type of message. Symbolic violence is an invisible violence based on furthering stereotypes, ideas or values that perpetuate inequality between men and women.

When entering the project, users select their year of birth and travel back in time to when they were 13 to discover what kind of media and cultural messages they received back then. We go over 5 years of their lives -from the year they were 13 to when they were 17- reviewing television shows, films, news, songs and magazines. All these messages have a common denominator: sexism.

Once you have relived your teenage years, you also have the option to experience what it would be like being a teenager born in another decade. This way, you will get to know other realities and see how, regardless of the decade, things are not so different.

How Sexism Shaped Our Teenage Years is an impressive project harnessing a great breadth of archive materials and innovative technologies to meet a social purpose and need and can leave a strong legacy to change things for the better.  

The jury appreciates that the project boldly addresses one of the key objectives and values of an archive: to look back at the past from a current perspective. It does so by addressing a challenging topic that is contemporarily still very vivid, creates space for reflection, and triggers a socially relevant discussion. 

One of the biggest strengths of the project is that it is the user who plays an active role in the experience, and each personal history is put into a bigger, collective context, making the user more aware of the impact of sexism presented in the media over the decades.

The jury also recognises the great research and curatorial effort that has been put into selecting the right content and building narratives around it. It also praises the high level of self-reflection of the archive, deciding to tell stories, explain and educate using its own challenging or even harmful archival content instead of hiding it in the vaults.

The BBC 100 anniversary – combined with the pandemic – hastened a swift digital transformation of the BBC History offers to an amplified and centralised BBC 100 branded site. This was launched on 1 Jan 20022 and augmented through the 12 months of centenary celebrations. All history and heritage aspects of the BBC story were focussed on this platform for the whole Corporation. A new collaboration with BBC News created a unique BBC timeline, enabling users to click on any year and find a moment of revelation – technological, cultural or content-led.

Three major digital collections were also created: 100 Objects/100 Faces/100 Voices, mining the range of BBC’s different archives and creating different entry points for audiences.

The site was dynamised by a specially commissioned animated front page (made for the BBC by Four Communications) and refreshed constantly throughout the year by a range of guest curators – from top talent (Lauren Laverne/Jarvis Cocker/Gregg Wallace) to museum curators and young reporters. Plus, audiences were asked to contribute their own memories of what the BBC meant to them over the century.

The site attracted 1.36 million page views.

BBC 100 is an extraordinary website to celebrate the centenary of the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Behind this fascinating platform stands vast archival work: Special collections comprising photos, props, documents or sheet music were digitised and thus made accessible for the first time ever. The web content is visually appealing, tailored for a young as well as for a mature audience, for casual interest but also for experts. A dynamic interactive timeline guides the user through one hundred years of the BBC. Special curated digital collections – “100 Objects”, “100 Faces”, and “100 Voices” – invite the viewers to dive into the colourful and diverse world of the BBC.

Throughout the anniversary year, the audience was actively invited to send in its own memories and personal stories to share with the public.

The jury appreciates that the well-curated project included the academic community as well. The BBC Oral History archive was accessed, digitised and instructively curated by media historians of Sussex University.

The most appealing visualisation of the fascinating content and the ease of navigating are highlighted by the jury members. The website BBC 100 gives a perfect example for other broadcast companies on how to celebrate their first one hundred years.

Sound & Vision manages one of the largest digitised media archives in the world. Packed with (among others) radio, television, YouTube videos, objects, written press, podcasts and games, we preserve our daily growing media collection as cultural heritage for eternity. At the same time, we closely follow all movements of the global media landscape and shed light on current affairs from a media-historical perspective.

At Sound & Vision, we welcome these developments in our recently completely new, state-of-the-art Media Museum (reopened February 11th 2023). In the new Media Museum, visitors can experience how media have now become part of your everyday life and how this came about. This huge influence of media on our daily lives is presented in five interactive zones that focus on five universal human needs: Share, Inform, Sell, Tell and Play.

The museum visit is a personal one. During your visit, you are (literally) recognised as a media personality everywhere. In the personalised visitor experience, each visitor gets to see their own content, in line with how the media actually work in our daily lives. When you come in, you’re profiled, sharing information like your age, interests and media preferences. The longer you walk around, watch and play, the closer you get to your own unique ‘media personality’. The museum adapts its presentations to your individual characteristics as a first step towards an individually tailor-made experience.

The museum is highly interactive: you can be a reporter of the news, put yourself in the shoes of an influencer or create your own video game. The museum is packed with audiovisual fragments and media objects. The lively, interactive and entertaining exhibits give visitors insight into the workings of media and help create a more media-literate society.

The Media Museum is a brand new, unique initiative opening digital archives for visitors in a physical space. The museum uses the most advanced technology to create an immediate interaction between the curated content and the visitors in several exhibitions. It also implements innovative copyright solutions allowing to unlock, otherwise impossible to use, archival materials.

The jury appreciates the use of a personalised experience in the museum aimed to attract people of all ages from 8 years. Such an approach gives the museum a unique possibility of educating young people in history while at the same time offering a strong feeling of coherence with the content for the older audience. 

It is a magnificent example of a national audiovisual museum with appeal and of huge value for recognising the country’s media history and applying it to address contemporary issues using contemporary tools and storytelling methods, boosting media literacy and critical thinking.

Seventy-Five Years of Israeli history is portrayed through the myths that shaped it.
The founding legends, the tales we were raised upon, true or false, for better or worse.

A new documentary series that unfolds and dissects the national collective consciousness into its components and analyzes them. Myths from the past as well as of today still play a central role in our perception of reality; For some Israelis, they are the core of identification; for others, they embody turning a blind eye, humiliation and repression.

The series, with its unique visual language, creates a combination between archival materials and current testimonies of speakers who are not experts but people who took part in the events that shaped the country.

The four episodes of the series present the constant tension between ideology and reality. Through the personal stories of the heroines and heroes of the series, the constant clash between big ideas and the individual is crystallized on the screen.

Chapter 2 – “The Melting Pot”: The constant tension in Israel, being a Jewish and democratic state, is frequently at the centre of attention. These two words and the hyphen connecting them contain the biggest unsolved question between the various tribes and ethnic groups that make up our local mosaic. An equation that has been searching for a solution for more than seven decades

The Myth Machine by IPBC Kan is a four-episode series that portrays the last 75 years of Israeli history through the myths that shaped it. Founding legends and other stories have contributed to the national collective consciousness of the country, both in the past and present.

The series combines archival footage with current personal testimonies from everyday citizens who participated in the events that shaped the country. This combination of self-experienced Israeli history reflects the diversity of society. Additionally, the series offers valuable lessons and interpretations about the past of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.

The FIAT/IFTA Awards Jury was deeply impressed by the unique visual language of the documentary, the selection of witnesses who challenge their own memories and significant myths of Israel, and the innovative and symbolic setting. Using a wealth of archival footage to engage ordinary citizens in understanding their own past and national identity feels both brave and timely.

Salzburg, Austria, 1948: A mysterious woman appears out of nowhere. She hands over a suitcase full of photos taken between 1916 and the 1970s to a private detective. Marlene Dietrich flirting in a Salzburg café, conductor Arturo Toscanini hurrying across a Salzburg square, unknown beauties in a photo studio. Your assignment: Find out everything you can about the photographer of these pictures, Carl Ellinger. The detective cannot refuse this boring job. She is far too beautiful for that.

Soon the detective is not only involved in love but in a criminal case: Carl Ellinger disappeared long before these photos were taken. Who then took these pictures? What does his client have to do with the American occupiers who are apparently protecting her? And what foreign power is constantly after him?

Dependent on each other, the couple, who did not want to be one, grope from one trap to the next. Everywhere there are traces that lead to nowhere. Did the one who is behind all these photos lay them? Or the one?! Someone who must have existed because these photos are published worldwide. It must be someone close to the founder of the Salzburg Festival, Max Reinhardt.

As the truth presents itself right before their eyes, the mysterious woman and the detective can no longer escape their own: Lies and repression, a game of real society that they have also played.

Double Exposure by Beate Thalberg is an exciting six-part archive detective series that combines documentary and film-noir elements to break open traditional genres. The crime story revolves around the Austrian photographer Carl Ellinger, who disappeared long before hundreds of thousands of photos in his name were taken. The pictures, taken between 1916 and the 1970s, depict life in Salzburg during those times, especially at the Salzburg Festivals, featuring celebrities such as Marlene Dietrich or Arturo Toscanini. The series has many layers, including old stills, moving archive material, footage from fiction films of the 30s and 40s, animated graphic novels, and newly filmed material cleverly intercut with the archive.

The FIAT/IFTA Awards Jury was fascinated by the surprising appearance that combines different genres and film techniques, the complexity of archive sources, the marvellous editing, and the exciting investigative story that encourages learning about the past. The result is a beautiful piece of audiovisual art.