The project aims to comprehensively digitise RAI news programs produced between 1952 and 1985, currently preserved on 16mm film reels. This archive comprises approximately 350.000 reels (10.000 hours) and holds invaluable historical and editorial significance, documenting the early years of television in Italy when RAI was the sole national broadcaster.

The film reels are at high risk of deterioration due to the vinegar syndrome, making urgent preservation – both physical and digital – essential, utilizing state-of-the-art technology. The resulting digital version utilizes standard, interoperable formats and high-quality specifications, with 12-bit color depth video and resolution exceeding 2K.

Currently in production, the project is expected for completion by early 2026, partially funded by public resources from the Ministry of Culture. Preparation and digitisation are outsourced to external providers, under the strict coordination and supervision of RAI.
RAI ensures technical Quality Control of the digitised material, manages the film reel logistics (inbound and outbound), and creates video clips of individual news items, with synchronized audio and video.

A distinctive feature of the project is the application of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to generate descriptive metadata, including transcriptions, facial recognition, named entities recognition, summaries.

The digitised content, along with the generated metadata, is uploaded to RAI’s content management system for subsequent reuse. A low-resolution version of the entire collection, including the metadata, will be made available through a digital platform managed by the Digital Library (commissioned by the Ministry), accessible to public bodies and universities for research and educational purposes.

For the last 3 years, RAI Archive has been hard at work preparing a massive plan for the migration of 350 000 newsreels of 16mm film. The scanning, in 12-bit 2K overscan resolution, is outsourced, so RAI devised clever methods to keep track of everything, for instance by getting hold of the colour grading project files so the grading process can be readjusted for any particular news item later in the process if deemed necessary.
A lot of effort was put into making the content discoverable and readily usable, by separating each news item into a different file and by auto generating descriptive metadata including named entities and summaries.

This projects simply demonstrates excellence from start to end and compliance with the highest standards of preservation.

Digitisation started in 2024 and has reached the impressive pace of one hundred hours of content a week, enough to be finished by 2026, as per the initial objective.

This project kick-started in 2021 when a large quantity of at-risk magnetic tapes was identified for urgent digitisation to be done inhouse in view of its condition. Challenges included timeline, equipment availability, space constraints and resources where the team had to re-configure the whole lab setup to cater to multi-magnetic formats to be digitised simultaneously.

Duplicate or multiple copies suspected of having the same content were found to co-exist in the storage and the staff initially had to sit through to preview the full duration of the content side by side to compare them. This was very labour intensive and furthermore, after validating both copies were the same, the decision to preserve which one was never straight forward and mostly subjective basing on visual preference.

With the help of advanced tools which included automated Quality Control and AI tools, these had greatly helped the team to overcome the odds and complete the project on time.

Hoping to share the benefits of advanced tools such as AI transcriptions which not only will enhance the metadata but also can be an intelligent way of identifying duplicates of the same digitised content in the collection or storage. Using the Picture Quality Analysis tool to provide an objective assessment of the quality enable us to preserve the best quality copy, especially when the origin of the digitised copies is unknown.

The National Archives of Singapore (part of National Library Board or NLB) was confronted with a difficult situation back in 2021: tens of thousands of magnetic tapes, some mouldy, were identified as being at risk of becoming unplayable if not digitised quickly. Assorted budget constraints demanded that the migration of those assets be wrapped up within 2.5 years, after which funding was not provisioned.

As a result, outstanding effort was put at NLB into reorganising so all work could be done in house with the highest efficiency. International communities were reached out in order to implement best practices.

This project particularly highlights how crucial automation is to large scale migration, and in effect it was implemented at most stages of the workflow. One particularly creative use of AI powered processing is by generating speech-to-text transcripts to identify potential duplicates, then combine those results with an automatic picture quality analysis enabling to easily select the best version out of several copies.

This ambitious migration project was successfully completed on time in 2024.

The Filmoteka Narodowa – Instytut Audiowizualny (National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute) has undertaken a full digital restoration of the Polish silent film Mocny Człowiek (The Strong Man), directed by Henryk Szaro in 1929. This film, widely regarded as the greatest Polish silent film, features an international cast and has become an icon of Polish cinematography from that era.

Unfortunately, no film elements survived in Poland due to wartime destruction, similar to the fate of the majority of Poland’s silent film collection, of which only about 5% has been preserved. Fortunately, through collaboration within FIAF, another archive – CINEMATEK – Cinémathèque royale de Belgique, discovered the only known surviving theatrical distribution print, released by a Belgian producer in a Flemish-French language version around year 2000. Thanks to excellent international cooperation, the Belgian archive digitized the nitrate material for us in 4K resolution.

The copy was severely damaged mechanically, including numerous perforation issues that made scanning difficult. Additionally, it was heavily scratched due to extensive theatrical use—having been screened hundreds of times. This made it one of the most challenging sources for digitization, but as it was the only known surviving material, we had no other choice.

The digital restoration proved to be an immense challenge. Due to extensive visible scratches and other damages resulting from heavy exploitation—such as stains, tears, significant reel-end markings, and image flickering—FINA’s restoration team had to undertake a substantial amount of manual work, which took eight months to complete. One of the most difficult tasks was the removal of a large scratch that extended across almost the entire film.

Additionally, no Polish intertitles or opening credits had been preserved. The original script and dialogue list were also lost. The Polish text had to be retranslated from the Belgian copy. Given these circumstances, FINA decided to recreate the original font based on examples from other films produced by the same studio, Gloria and surviving Polish Filmprogram distributed in cinemas. Handwritten text was also used to reconstruct intertitles of letters shown in the film. As a result, all intertitles were faithfully recreated.

The entire restoration workflow and all interventions were documented in our Collection Management System to keep process transparent with key information displayed on an information board for bigger audience. This restoration serves as an outstanding example of European cooperation in reconstructing national film collections after wartime destruction. It also showcases the full extent of our expertise and dedication.

Few films from the silent era of Polish cinema have survived WW2. “A strong man”, released in 1929, is one of them. Only one copy is known to exist, in a translated version located at the Cinémathèque Royale in Belgium. It is likely that the film has never been shown in its original language since the war.

The National Film Archive and Audiovisual Institute of Poland (FINA) took on the task of restoring the film into its initial form and was confronted to the enormous challenge of dealing with the fragile nature of nitrate film and the arduous digital restoration that comes behind. This project is an excellent example of the importance of international cooperation for reappropriating national heritage that has vanished. It reminds us that restoration is also a work of art, as demonstrated by the reconstruction of missing credits and intertitles in their original Polish language, by sampling other titles available from the same period as a reference. The whole restoration took 9 months, making it the biggest restoration job to date at FINA.

Imagine this: What if there were one place for all your audiovisual needs? Lithuanian Central State Archives can answer that easily – we proudly present the latest version of our newly launched virtual audiovisual archive, E-Kinas (which means E-Cinema or E-Movie).

Although our archive has felt the need for such a website since 2012, the journey to this point has been long. The most important period of work began in 2022 with the opening of the Movie Archive. In 2024, we expanded to include the Photography Archive, and in 2025, we launched the Audio Archive. This is where we mark the beginning of our main project, as it is only then that E-Kinas became a true virtual audiovisual archive, preserving three main types of documents.

Our primary goal is to promote and make our digitized audiovisual heritage more visible, accessible, and reusable! We aim to engage visitors not just in watching and exploring the content but also in searching for and utilizing it. That’s why we’ve included a range of features and online services that are available to every visitor. Feel free to explore over 200,000 documents at your own pace, without any geo-blocking, at any time.

Today, E-Kinas is an active participant in the ongoing dialogue of Lithuanian culture. We collaborate daily with filmmakers, photographers, researchers, and amateur artists. We are proud to provide material for documentary films, exhibitions, and books. Our audience also includes the general public – seniors, schoolchildren, students, and families – as well as the Lithuanian diaspora living abroad. E-Kinas is evolving into more than just a website; it’s becoming a vibrant live and virtual community.

Thanks to the modernized, user-friendly interface, more and more audiovisual heritage can be re-used for educational, artistic, and other purposes. It’s time for you to visit E-Kinas!

E-KINAS is more than just a virtual audiovisual archive – it is an engaging and evolving ”shop window” of Lithuanian archive footage aimed at a vibrant live and virtual community. The online archive collection addresses not only private visitors or the academic and scholastic community, but also professional users as filmmakers or photographers. The jury was attracted by the user-friendly interface: A variety of electronic services including a detailed search function, rights availability and copyright management, personal orders, metadata additions and personal gallery creation allow visitors not only to explore but also to engage actively with the site. The platform, consisting of more than 200,000 items, offers a movie archive, a section with photographs, and an audio collection – without any geo-blocking.

Canuint.ie is a unique innovative online repository of Irish Dialects audio recordings and transcripts. The project was developed and collated in a partnership between Dublin City University -Gaois Research Group, RTÉ Archives and, Radio na Gaeltachta, RTÉ’s Irish language broadcast radio service, supported by the Archive Funding Scheme of Coimisiún na Meán, Ireland’s national media regulator.

The aim of the project was to make a collection of exemplary regional Irish language dialects from the RTÉ Archives available to the public in general as well as for the scientific and linguistic research community for the promotion and development of the Irish language.

It includes an initial 200 selected exemplary recordings from twelve counties, incorporating Gaeltacht areas as they are understood today, where Irish is still the spoken language, as well as localities where the language has long since disappeared.

The recordings are plotted on an interactive map which acts as a browsing aid for the user. and have been dialectically transcribed below the audio player, synchronised word for word with the audio track in a way that helps the user to follow the conversation. The transcriptions are also provided in standardised Irish and this version is given as a guide wherever the dialectal transcription deviates from standard spelling.

The focus of the repository includes some of the earliest Irish recordings collated, from collections dating back to the 1930s and 40s up to the 1990s. This was a hugely complex project due to the disparate locations and history of the recordings and conservation issues and linguistic metadata challenges involved, resulting in some 160,000 hours of Irish Language audio materials identifed, collated, conserved, and digitised into a single unified archive and now preserved and accesible as part of RTÉ’s digital archiving programme.

Work on research and development of the project involved a collaboration of experts from the RTE Archives, RTE Technology, Radio na Gaeltachta and Irish Language programme makers and specialists, with partners in DCU providing linguistic and technical expertise from speicalists in the DCU Gaois research group.

“A Digital Archive of Irish Dialects” is a unique innovative online collection of Irish Dialects audio recordings and transcripts. The jury was deeply impressed by the huge archival work that had gone into the digital archiving program: around 160,000 hours of Irish Language audio material had to be identified, collated and conserved, footage dating back to the 1930s up to the 1990s. Canuint.ie is an interactive map which is easy to navigate, offers dialectical transcriptions and a word for word-synchronization.

The jury emphasized the impressive academic support as the RTÉ Archives project was curated together in partnership with the Dublin City University Gaois Research Group and Radio na Gaeltachta, RTÉ’s Irish language broadcast radio service. The jury shortlisted this powerful project as a perfect example for other countries how to preserve and safeguard their dialects and minority languages.

100 Years On Air is an interactive digital experience created by RTVE’s Innovation Lab to celebrate the centenary of radio in Spain. Framed as an online escape room, the project invites users on a time-traveling journey through ten decades of Spanish radio history.

The experience challenges users to test their knowledge of the medium, but all puzzles can be solved by listening carefully to the audio clues in each room. Players must identify voices, match events to dates, or interact with historical objects to unlock a final frequency. A hint button and countdown timer shape the journey, revealing a listener profile—expert, loyal, or amateur—along with a custom audio recap once the mission is complete.

The project also features a curated archive of over 150 audio clips—many exclusive to this section—offering deeper immersion into the medium’s legacy. Organized by decade and freely accessible, it showcases everything from vintage ads to rare recordings of iconic voices, underlining the cultural impact of radio in Spain.

For its 100-year radio anniversary RTVE offered its audience an entertaining and innovative digital escape room that takes users on a journey through Spanish radio, from 1924 to 2024. Players can enter 11 virtual rooms, each representing a different decade where the history of radio is to be explored. In each room the users may interact with objects and solve hidden puzzles guided by audio clips from the archive to experience Spanish radio. The jury highlighted the engaging and educational impact on how a centenary of radio history is provided to the audience. By integrating original RNE audio clips into a digital escape room, archive footage is perfectly brought into life.

In her landmark speech on November 26, 1974, before an overwhelmingly male Assembly, Simone Veil 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, the 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.

The jury felt that Just Listen to Women is a perfect example of how a documentary may deal with a very sensitive and touching topic to tell a history that is still unknown to many. The jury was deeply impressed with how the current testimonies were balanced and intertwined with the archival footage and highly appreciated the huge amount of organisational and research work carried out at the beginning of the project eg researching the archive footage as well as curating the amateur footage and photos of the interview partners, and finding possible interview partners who are willing to talk about abortion in front of a camera. The 65 testimonies filmed, which also included family members and partners, required a very emphatic and sensitive way of shooting and the jury was overwhelmed by the courage of the testimonies by the interview partners. The jury were also impressed by the skillful editing and production in this documentary.

‘In the Veins’ resonates through time, using over a century of archive footage to shine a light onto the face of the mining heritage of Yorkshire and the North East of England.

A story of hardship and hope, division and defiance, perseverance and pride; this is not a history lesson, it’s an emotional journey that digs deep into the heart of a community built on coal. Commissioned by Teesside University and produced by the Yorkshire and North East Film Archive, the film is the result of mining for archive ‘black gold’ in amateur and professional films, promotional footage and regional BBC and ITV television programming and news, totalling over 115 source films, then carefully crafting a respectful production that would represent a proud and often forgotten community.

Released in 2024 to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the end of the 1984/85 UK year-long coal mining strikes, the 24-minute film has been screened at film festivals, in regional libraries, museums and published on YouTube. Importantly, it has been screened in community centres and village halls in former mining communities across the North of England, many of which are still feeling the effects of the end of the mining industry.

Telling the story of the coal industry, but significantly the human experience, through only archive footage and found voices in the vaults of the Yorkshire and North East Film Archive, was a massive undertaking. The 13-strong volunteer ‘community curator’ group who have lived and worked in mining communities, at the coalface, in the community, were central to ensure the film was meaningful and authentic.

“The film shows the importance of coal, how it kept us all warm, how it kept the wheels of industry turning and how communities came together as each pit was sank. It shows the price of coal, the deaths and illnesses caused by mining the black gold. It shows the strength and tenacity of miners and their families who over the years fought for a fair wage, better working conditions, and in 1984 fought the state hoping to keep jobs and community. It tells our story and it tells it well!”

Heather Wood, community curator (active in the ‘Women Against Pit Closures’ movement)

The jury felt that In the Veins is a powerful and original short film that explores over a century of coal mining history in Yorkshire and the North East of England—told entirely through archive footage, with no newly shot material. Every frame in the film comes from more than 115 rare and previously inaccessible sources, which were researched, digitised, and brought back to life for this project. At the heart of the film is the exceptional quality of archive integration. Amateur films, professional documentaries, local or national news reports, and promotional footage are seamlessly edited to form a visually compelling and emotionally resonant narrative. The result is a film that is as humorous and warm as it is tragic and thought-provoking. In the Veins is not just a historical account of the British transition from fossil fuels to a cleaner energy – it is an emotional journey through perseverance, loss, community, and pride. It captures the spirit of the people behind the industry and shines a light on the cost of progress, from the rise of coal to the devastating impact of pit closures. This unique production should be commended for its originality and for the powerful use of archive as both storyteller and testimony.