In October 2018, VIAA launched a website to help everyone with any kind of audiovisual material in their attic or basement. The website has three direct purposes: 1) help people identify which audiovisual carrier type they hold, 2) help to establish its heritage value and 3) advise on how it can be digitised and how the carrier as well as the resulting files should be preserved. Indirectly, the site raises the awareness about audiovisual heritage and brings specialised professional knowledge much closer to a general audience.

The tool has many extras and the use of a decision tree, enriched with photographs and fun facts, makes the tool easy to use. With binary yes-no questions and simple questions about the shape or size of a carrier, you can identify your own carrier and determine its heritage value. Furthermore, the tool helps with customised advice on preservation and digitisation. You will not only find out whether you have a wax cylinder, a video CD or maybe even a Betacam in your hand, you will also find guidelines for a correct preservation. To top this, we’ve added a template and specification table that support you in formulating specific questions to digitisation companies. By launching knowyourcarrier.com, we share expert knowledge about the process of preservation with everyone in an innovative way.

Since our foundation in 2012, VIAA has digitised a broad scope and large volume of audiovisual materials from broadcasters, museums, archives and government bodies. In each digitisation project we tackled new types of carriers, leading to an extensive knowledge about digitisation and sustainable preservation for several types of carriers, according to the current international standards (including IASA TC04 and IASA TC06). We noticed that, in many organisations, there is a lack of knowledge about carrier types and how to best preserve or digitise them. On top of that, we often receive questions from individuals about the nature of certain carriers and if we could help to preserve or to digitise them. We all know valuable sound and image is not only kept by professional organisations like broadcasters, museums and archives, but also stored by individuals everywhere in society. Sometimes it gets lost, because people have carriers, but don’t have the players anymore, don’t know that what they own is actually of heritage value, and just ‘get rid of old stuff’. For example: an individual may have the only copy of programmes that a television archive did not preserve. Or a private collection of magnetic tapes with heritage value could benefit from professional care, which is also the scope of UNESCO’s recently launched Magnetic Tape Alert Project. ‘Knowyourcarrier.com’ brings a responsible and correct answer to the many questions that one may have about audiovisual preservation.

We launched knowyourcarrier.com on Saturday, 27 October 2018, World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, with as a central theme: ‘Your story is moving’. This was very appropriate, since we help a great number of potential storytellers to safeguard their sources for future generations with the tool. The website has its own link, but is also accessible through the VIAA website. To increase the website’s findability, we also offer iFrames. With this feature, the website can be integrated in another website. The tool is available in both Dutch and English, making it relevant to an international community.

Archiving born-digital collections

Sound and Vision established its digital archive of radio and television broadcasts as of 1999. It started collecting web video in 2008, websites in 2013 and video games in 2016. Since 2012, the research team has been investigating possibilities for archiving more complex interactive websites and virtual reality productions. Initially, from a collection strategy point of view, born-digital collections have been treated as “contextual” materials that support and add value to the radio and television collections which were regarded as the core collection of Sound and Vision. Given the many changes in media production and consumption, this differentiation between core and contextual collections has become obsolete. In the latest Collection Policy, published earlier this year, a more substantive order was adopted. Topical pillars now form the foundation of the collection policy. These are populated with collections that encompass various media types that range from linear television to web-video and physical artefacts to video games.

Reconceptualising the Collection Policy into four broad pillars that encompass media in all its possible shapes and sizes, opened the way to include new artefacts that would have never been considered as part of a core collection before. In particular, it lowered the archival threshold for born-digital artefacts like GIFs that previously would not have been recognised as a prominent element in the digital media landscape.

Preserving GIFs

GIFs have become an inseparable part of digital culture, spreading like a virus across the web. Despite that, GIFs have not been widely recognised as cultural heritage and have not found their way into archival collections. We are eager to challenge this. We consider GIFs as a broader cultural phenomenon that appropriates easily-recognisable cues from audiovisual culture to convey messages that immediately move us.

They are part of a remix culture online that takes fragments from popular television shows and renders them into memes with silly captions, they show footage of celebrities with funny facial expressions that we can all relate to, or they capture memorable moments that we want to watch over and over again. The list goes on and on, but what all of these GIFs have in common is that they serve as a reflection of the current zeitgeist in the digital communication sphere. As an organisation tasked with preserving Dutch media culture, we cannot overlook GIFs as an important part of it that needs to be preserved and represented in our collections.

So what kind of GIFs could be collected for a Dutch GIF collection? That turns out to be quite a tricky question. GIFs have no national or thematic boundaries. Good luck finding GIFs tagged “Dutch” or “Netherlands”! Is it even possible or necessary to determine the “dutchness” of a GIF? We have scavenged through the web to find what we think best matches our selection criteria. But we needed help figuring out what fits into the collection and what doesn’t. And this is where the help of our users comes in! On the 26-28th of October 2018, we used our Instagram channel to let the Dutch public decide what should be included in the GIF collection at Sound and Vision. This way, the audience received the opportunity to cast their vote and choose which GIFs should be preserved for the future.

The RTS Quality Check project uses the potential of artificial intelligence (AI), that is to say computer vision, to ease quality control of video files produced by mass digitization. Five algorithms are currently checking almost 400’000 files, resulting from the digitization of 120’000 analogue carriers (mainly Betacam SP), so as to ease human work. Humans have only to examine the results of the algorithms, and, decide if a new digitization is needed.

These 5 algorithms have been calibrated by our project, with the main common anomalies or artefacts that we found in our digitized tv archive collection and categorized according to their type. An interface was also designed to display the results of the algorithms so that humans can make the right decisions easily and efficiently. The main goal was to avoid any loss of our unique audiovisual heritage, because unfortunately, the quality control was not done thoroughly enough during the mass digitization and this for lack of financial and technical means at the time, and because there are threats on the original carriers, like time passing by.

What was a challenge is that RTS Archive Department had to find a solution to carry out this quality control in a context of cost-saving measures and after digitization (which made the process much more complicated). As the potential of AI was raising in almost any field, we decided to try using it in the context of the Quality Control.

TV Guide 1968 represents so far the biggest web project the Czech TV archives has participated on. The idea of transformation of old paper TV guide into its digital interactive version was born as the 50th anniversary of the Prague Spring was coming closer. The more often we were leafing through old issues to search for relevant information about the then broadcast, the more intensely we were dreaming about its online version available for all users searching for the same information that would like same as the old paper version. But we didn’t want only a textual database, we decided to create a fully-fledged AV portal and publish there as many AV materials, sound files, photos and articles as we could. The guide was being released week after week during the whole year 2018. Due to IPR reasons we couldn’t publish everything that survived, but still it stands for very complex source of broadcast of Czechoslovak TV in the important year 1968.

TILT is an online innovative storytelling platform with which we tell stories about man, media and society. Due to its technology we can share our archive by telling these stories about past, present and future and putting them into context. With copyright and Intellectual Property issues, we of course have to be careful. That’s why we keep a close eye on citation law and only use short fragments of our archive to get our point across. There’s also the question of ethics when telling a story: is it newsworthy enough or could usage of the footage harm someone? We also have a privacy check to make sure none of the footage we use for example show children (under age). These are all questions we’re dealing with when writing a story and take into close consideration on whether or not to use (archival) footage. But all of it comes together in great stories about media in one form or another, showing the relevance of our archive as well as show the relevance of certain subjects.

Sound and Vision is an institute for media and archiving. To expand on our position and mission, we wanted to publish articles about man, media and society. This way we don’t only show that we’re up to date with media culture, but that we want to participate in it. Our target group is everyone with an above average interest in media, which may vary from newspapers to vlogs, from television to games and the web. Our primary focus will be on millennials (18-36). TILT is the unique result of that: an innovative story platform built out of cards. We make stories with snackable cards that you’ll still want to read and watch – despite the short attention span. The vertical orientation and swipe interaction make it ideal to read with one hand. A visual language and strong emphasis on attractive footage makes the ‘instagram worthy’ story platform unresistable for this generation. The stories on the cards come to life with smart combinations of (archival) video, audio, lively text, photography, interactive polls and/or questions. And if you don’t feel like reading it right away, you can always choose the shorter version or ‘snooze’ it, but sending a reminder to yourself.

RSI experience on getting the new generation close to the archival contents.

ARchive is a new way of consuming A/V content that anyone can use simply switching on the mobile device and point in all direction discovering contents with high added value, both historical and emotional. A walkthrough in augmented reality world. Linking the new technology to the world of archival content and bring the history to user direct in the field.

Thanks to the use of augmented reality technology and GPS, we offer to the user the ability to access A/V contents of our archives linked to the region and in particular to those contents strongly related to the position in which the user is. The ARchive application is able in real time to determine the position of the user and place all the A/V contents selected from our archives in the space around. Each content has his own set of metadata like title, description, coordinates that allow the user to make the experience more complete.