#ArchivalReads
The #ArchivalReads are a new series of publications collected by the FIAT/IFTA Value, Use and Copyright Commission. The #ArchivalReads can be in house produced articles or articles, or recommended reading: high quality publications by other organisations or individuals active in the audiovisual and media archiving domain.
In house produced articles:
- Approaching the contract: Efforts in opening the AV heritage to online audiences. This article is based on a speech taken by Valentina Martone (RAI) and Gabriele Di Majo (RAI) at the FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2021. Starting from the change of AV consumption habits brought by the pandemic, the paper shows how Rai tackles Copyright issues encountered in exploiting its older archival materials in a non-linear environment.
- ‘Het Archief voor Onderwijs’: communicating Flemish archive materials to teachers and their pupils. This interview by Louise Broch (DR) is about an educational platform called ‘Het Archief voor Onderwijs’ (The education archive), built by VIAA (now meemoo) in collaboration with VRT in Belgium. Jan Noppe from the VRT Archive and Karen Vander Plaetse from meemoo tell the story of their successful education project.
- RTVE’s Verification Team in the Corona virus crisis. In this article Iris López de Solís, documentalist at RTVE in Madrid, explains how their fact checking team fights several forms of misinformation circulating in Spain related to the virus outbreak. Archival and information management skills are a crucial contribution to the work of this team.
- Archive Responses to the Coronavirus Crisis. This large article by Dale Grayson (Northbound Television) and Montserrat Bailac (TV3) outlines how the corona virus outbreak has affected the functioning of various audiovisual archives around Europe, and how they subsequently set up a diversity of initiatives that respond to the questions and needs of their audiences. The article also features links to no less than six case studies on the same subject.
- Artificial Intelligence: an Object of Desire. In this article Virginia Bazán-Gil (RTVE) gives an overview of how artificial intelligence technologies were tested at the RTVE Archives in the Iberspeech and Crónicas projects. A roadmap is also added to learn how to embrace artificial intelligence technologies for broadcast archives work.
- DWDD: 15 years of a popular Dutch chat show in data. In this article a team of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision discusses show they analysed 15 seasons of the popular Dutch chat show ‘DWDD’, making use of the manual annotations and automated data analysis techniques for so-called close and distant reading. Eventually, the authors add also a critical view on the potential biases caused by the applied methods.
- From radio archivists to broadcast historians in residence. In this interview Louise Broch of DR and Michael Liensberger of ORF explain how their role evolved from radio archivists to in-house historians contributing to cross media formats with a focus on the history of a broadcaster and a country.
- BBC’s archival editorial team and the response to the coronavirus crisis. In this article Dale Grayson of Northbound Television gauges the reaction of the BBC Archival Editorial team to the worldwide coronavirus crisis. In particular, Dale asked them how a television archive can provide an added value in the search for mental peace, entertainment and a happy note in lockdown times.
Recommended reading:
- VIEW, the Journal of European Television History and Culture: the latest issue of VIEW reexamines public service broadcasting (PSB) in the light of the most recent technological, political and economic developments. Traditional public service broadcasters, ideally designed to serve citizens rather than consumers to inform the national conversations in well-informed democracies, face the double challenge of commercialization (since the 1980s) and digitization (since the 1990s). The question of their survival in this context has been posed again and again. The need for a redefinition seems inevitable.
- Typology Guide of the Lacquer Disks Collection of Radio Lausanne and Radio Genève: an outcome of a large scale lacquer disk digitisation project (2014 – 2018) at RTS in Switzerland, this publication provides deep insight in the history of lacquer disk production and use. Furthermore it explores various types of disks and discusses particular preservation issues and remedies for each of them. A study of a rare scientific quality in this domain.
- The FIAF Journal of Film Preservation nr. 102, April 2020: in a reaction to the corona virus outbreak, our colleagues of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) have exceptionally made the April 2020 edition of the Journal of Film Preservation freely accessible to all online. This issue features amongst others an article by Jörg Houpert, member of the FIAT/IFTA Preservation and Migration Commission (PMC), on the new German standard for film digitisation DIN SPEC 15587.
- The results of UNESCO’s Magnetic Tape Alert Project: organised in collaboration with IASA, the survey provides interesting insights in the global preservation situation of obsolete magnetic tape carriers. The survey received 411 submissions from 355 archives from 76 countries.
- The results of INA’s survey on obsolete video formats: this study analyses the preservation means and training needs for quadruplex videotapes and/or other video collections. The survey results will be the basis for a training programme, each one focused on a specific video format.
- The Olympic World Feed Project: Searching, acquiring and preserving the international television signal of the Olympic Games from 1956 to 1988. This article discusses the efforts of the Olympic Foundation for Culture and Heritage to track down lost tapes and recovering missing television footage from several editions of the Olympics, with a focus on the XIV Olympic Winter Games in Sarajevo. The project, in which intensive use was made of the FIAT/IFTA network, yielded excellent result not only in the enhancement of the IOC’s own audiovisual collections, but also for several participating broadcast archives.
- MediaNumeric State of the Art report on Data Journalism. “Though misinformation and disinformation have existed since the dawn of time, the social media era is enabling information (and misinformation) to spread at split-second speeds, creating real-world harm as people turn to unqualified sources to seek answers to their questions.”
