The 2017 World Conference traditionally featured also the announcement of this year’s Archive Achievement Awards during the Gala Dinner at the Interactive Museum of Economy. The winner of this year’s Most Innovative Use of Archive Award was Radio.garden, a global browser for radio programmes through space and time, by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. The Best Use of Archive Award went to The Smuggler and her Charges, an intriguing documentary from Michaël Prazan about his own father’s escape from Nazi occupied France. The Best Archive Preservation Project Award had two winners: Arabs in Spain, a documentary submitted by Al Arabiya, and Visual Memorandum by the Shanghai Media Group, a preservation project focusing on the oldest moving image archives of Chinese colleges.

Last but not least, two Honorary Awards were attributed to true giants of our profession. First was the association’s founding mother, mrs. Anne Hanford, former Head of Archives at the BBC and second president of FIAT/IFTA. Next to her we also honoured mr. Richard Wright, who held several roles at the BBC archives, served for numerous years as a thriving force behind many international archival research projects and still counts as one of the world’s biggest experts in audiovisual archiving as a whole.