The Film Digitisation Service of the Archivio Storico Luce is a large-scale preservation programme dedicated to safeguarding one of Europe’s most significant audiovisual collections.

Carried out at Cinecittà in Rome, the project aims to preserve a unique audiovisual heritage spanning more than a century. It involves the digitisation of 13,000 film reels across a wide range of image and sound formats, many of which are threatened by physical deterioration and chemical decay. The initiative integrates traditional archival practices with advanced digitisation technologies, supported by state-of-the-art equipment and highly specialised in-house expertise.

Supported by the European Union’s NextGenerationEU programme, the project also required a significant, time-bound expansion of staff, with personnel recruited specifically for the duration and trained through structured knowledge-transfer programmes.

Beyond preservation, the initiative ensures long-term accessibility to Italy’s audiovisual heritage, making these historical images and sounds available for research, education, and future generations.

The Reuters Bureau Rushes Digitization Project addressed a critical preservation challenge: 15,000 hours of undigitized video and 45,000 photographs across 16 bureaus on 4 continents facing format obsolescence, inadequate storage, and threats from conflict and environmental disaster.

The content represents pivotal moments in history including rushes from 9/11, the Siege of Sarajevo and Putin’s first presidency. The greatest challenge was metadata paucity – handwritten notes, cryptic abbreviations, often illegible, making even digitized material undiscoverable. Our approach photographed tape cases to preserve original context, then deployed AI technology to generate time-based searchable metadata.

We built permanent infrastructure – the Reuters Media Ingest Hub: an integrated facility for the end to process of digitization, AI enrichment and ingest, with portable kit for on-site preservation in locations where material export is not feasible. This newly accessible content has directly supported 20+ documentary productions in 2025, with producers citing the material as transformative and video journalists reconnecting with decades of their work.

The methodology was shared at the FIAT/IFTA World Conference in 2025, for industry-wide knowledge transfer. This project demonstrated that strategic workflow design can make complex, at-risk collections with missing metadata both preservable and discoverable – ensuring journalism’s visual records remain accessible to storytellers who help us understand our shared history.

The CEDOC Documentation Center of the Padre Anchieta Foundation (TV Cultura) is structured into five main areas: Audiovisual Collection, Library, History Center, Audio Archive, and Collection Access. With the exception of the latter, each area is dedicated to a specific type of documentation and is responsible for the preservation, management, and dissemination of its holdings.

The Audiovisual Collection is organized into seven specialized units: Film Library, Video Library, Photography, Digital Lab (Editing), Cataloging, Indexing, and Content Research. The Audio Archive comprises Cataloging and Digitization units. The Collection Access area, in turn, is responsible for providing access to the various types of materials, serving both individuals and institutions through licensing and exchange agreements, on either a paid or free basis.

The CEDOC modernization and digitization project began in July 2021 with the renovation of spaces and storage facilities to ensure the preservation of the collections. It was structured around four main pillars: the acquisition of both state-of-the-art and legacy equipment for analog-to-digital conversion; the renovation and implementation of eight technical storage facilities; the deployment of a Media Asset Management (MAM) system across all areas; and the professional training of new technicians and interns.

By early 2024, all equipment had been acquired and the renovation of the storage facilities had been completed. In addition, a team of 80 technicians, including 15 interns, was working within the new workflows across all areas of CEDOC.

By the end of 2025, the new MAM system implemented through the project—serving all areas of the TV network—was fully operational for the film, photo, and video collections, and undergoing customization for the remaining areas.