4-6 OCTOBER · FIAT/IFTA WORLD CONFERENCE
CAPE TOWN 2022
Archives out of the box!
Breathe the history of the twentieth century. After almost three years without an opportunity to meet in person, we are extremely proud and happy to be able to reunite all those with a professional interest in media archives.
Archives out of the box!
After almost three years without an opportunity to meet in person, we are extremely proud and happy to be able to reunite all those with a professional interest in media archives. We did not hesitate one moment to keep Cape Town as the location for this conference, where the 2021 edition was also initially planned. Not only is this city an important continental hub in media production – think of the many media outlets that have their offices here and the ubiquitous facilities for film production – it also breathes the history of the twentieth century, the century in which television was to arise. We couldn’t imagine a better location for the first FIAT/IFTA World Conference on the African continent than this beautiful, iconic city.
As the theme for this year’s conference, we chose ‘Archives out of the box!’ With this title, we don’t just literally mean the travelling of archive material outside of the archive space, but also, in the figurative sense, the liberation from clichés such as ‘old’ and ‘irrelevant’. We even refer to the emancipation of the archivist, who has become an important partner in the decision-making process of media organisations, or – in the case of audiovisual archives outside broadcasting – an appreciated curator of online content on platforms of all kinds. It’s time to celebrate that new role, but also to discuss, explore and conquer the new possibilities that it brings.
FIAT/IFTA WORLD CONFERENCE 2022
SESSION RECORDINGS
Tracing Political Communication Via the Radio Archive: The case of the ANC’s anti-apartheid Radio Freedom
by Siyasanga M. Tyali
University of South Africa
The audio archive as a repository of media history and developments is vital in our research as media and communication scholars. In this keynote, the focus is on the ANC’s Radio Freedom as a political communication archive. Whilst these media initiatives of South Africa have been widely researched, the role of the ANC’s Radio Freedom continues to be underexplored, especially in research studies focusing on the country’s broadcasting history. From its initial broadcasts in 1963 to its exiled broadcasting initiatives, the ANC’s Radio Freedom grappled with the party’s political communication at a time when the ANC’s political voice was practically outlawed inside South Africa. This keynote contributes to the history and the historical understanding of media institutions by focusing on Radio Freedom and how it enabled political communication through the broadcasts and communication planning/ strategies affecting the platform. The keynote illustrates how the ANC’s Department of Information and Publicity (DIP) in general, and more particularly the Radio Freedom platform, assisted the ANC with political communication battles against the apartheid government of South Africa.
Tyali is Professor and Acting Director of the School of Arts, College of Human Sciences at the University of South Africa. He is also the Deputy Chairperson of the Film and Publication Board (FPB) and sits on the Steering Committee of South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLAR).
Reflections on a 100 years of archiving: BBC Archives from 1922-2022
by Mark Macey
BBC
2022 is the BBC’s centenary year, and 100 years of public service broadcasting are reflected in the archive.
The BBC was created with the purpose of informing, Educating and Entertaining, resulting in an ever-growing archive catalogue which holds a hundred years of local, national and global material.
Fast forward through the past 100 years of media archiving at the BBC, collecting and cataloguing the memorable, the iconic and the bizarre.
A summary of the past, present and future challenges:
- Storing the collection – many locations, many collections
- Cataloguing the archive – from ledgers to databases
- Technical challenges – how many formats?
- Obsolescence management – Can you play it back?
- The unexpected treasures held in the archives – 100 years of history and social commentary
The highlights and some low lights from one of the world’s largest media archives.
Lead Curator at BBC.
A Study on the current issues on establishing the audiovisual archiving policies: The activities of The Korean Association for Audiovisual Preservation (KAAP)
by Hyojin Choi
Information and Archival Science Research Institute Hankuk University of Foreign Languages
The Korean Association for Audiovisual Preservation (KAAP) is a professional and research group of people who are interested in the necessity of safeguarding audiovisual heritage and protection system in national level. This study covers the policy vacuum of audiovisual archiving in south Korea, the current issues of audiovisual archiving’s policy-making by national institutions, and civil activities, which have contributed to raise a new issue in their country. Even with the increasing popularity of so-called ‘Hallyu (Korean Wave)’ in movies, dramas, and pop music such as Squid Games and BTS, only several major terrestrial broadcasters have their own the exclusive copyright of re-use. National Archives of Korea(NAK) or Korean Film Archives(KOFA), main institutions of audiovisual archiving policy-making, don’t carry out any necessary action to protect national production like legal deposit, physical protection, providing access to the public, which are recommended in the UNESCO’s Recommendation adopted on 27 October 1980. The study focuses on the analysis of audiovisual archive under the negative environments on the safeguarding of audiovisual heritage in South Korea. The study also represents KAAP’s alternative actions to overcome this situation. KAAP has been re-established as corporate body since 2022. KAAP’s activities are more active to move national institutions, copyright holders, educators and researchers, etc. Since the beginning of 2022, KAAP launched the Social Memory Archiving Project, which means the building of an audiovisual archives for social memories captured in amateur films. KAAP will operate workshops and trainings with the publication of manual and guidelines. KAAP’s research on the policy and the governance on the audiovisual heritages to transmit it as a valuable cultural heritage. The study tries to find ideas to co-operate with national institutions and international organizations in order to implement basic and necessary policies.
Majored Audiovisual Heritage Management for Master’s degree in INA-Sup (School in Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, French National Audiovisual Archives, 2011-2013).
Currently, present as a researcher at Institute of Information and Archival Science of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (Seoul, South Korea). Working for national and institutional research project of Archival Science, Cultural Heritage, and Media. Obtained Ph.D in August 2021 from the Department of Information and Archival Science of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. Established The Korean Association for Audiovisual Preservation (KAAP) in September 2017 as a Director General. The Korean Association for Audiovisual Preservation research and organize related seminars and conferences (annual or semi-annual) on policy making of Audiovisual Heritage Protection and Safeguarding in South Korea.
Towards community-driven digital cultural heritage with a purpose: In Focus: Audiovisual Archives
by Maria Drabczyk, Johan Oomen & Marco Rendina
Centrum Cyfrowe, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision & Cinecittà – Archivio Luce
For over two decades, the cultural heritage sector has been going through the process of digital transition which has been accompanied by major change in how people perceive the role of culture and of the sector. Cultural heritage institutions have been observing how differently people interact with heritage (both on site and online) turning from audience into active creators. Increasingly heritage institutions have started to redefine their role and mission, taking into account the impact they have in many areas of social life. Audiovisual archives are no exception; they too are in the same strategic transition phase, during which they need to consider multiple aspects of their value, generating not only economic but also social and innovation impact.
There is a need for new policies for the archives, empowering active participation and community engagement, accelerating reuse of AV collections and data while considering ethical concerns and copyright challenges. Given this, a systemic and participatory approach that supports different forms of value creation should be put at the heart of the sector’s digital strategy.
This panel discussion will bring together experts from the audiovisual community invited to address these issues by commenting on newly released policy recommendations of the inDICEs project – a Horizon 2020 research project that aims to empower policy-makers in the cultural and creative industries to fully understand the social and economic impact of digitisation in their sectors and address the need for innovative (re)use of cultural assets.
Various aspects will be addressed, such as: what elements are needed to make audiovisual archives flourish and fulfil their mission in the digital realm? How to make them genuinly connect to their audiences and best demonstrate the value of their digital collections? Finally, how to address reuse of audiovisual assets and value chains that this reuse enables for communities?
Maria Drabczyk is Member of the Board and Head of policy and advocacy at Centrum Cyfrowe in Warsaw. She is a sociologist, researcher and manager of cultural projects interested in the social value of cultural heritage institutions and supporting both cultural and educational sectors in shaping their, user-focused, digital strategies. She is a board member of the EUscreen Foundation, member of the Europeana Association Members Council and Chair of the FIAT/IFTA Value, Use and Copyright Commission. In the past, she acted as a project manager at the National Film Archive –Audiovisual Institute (FINA) in charge of international cooperation, mostly focused on access and creative re-use of archival collections. She co-created a crowdfunding site for culture Wspieramkulture.pl and worked as an international relations expert at the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.
—
Johan Oomen is Head of Research and Heritage Services at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and a researcher at the User-Centric Data Science group of the VU University Amsterdam. Throughout his practice, Oomen works on initiatives that focus on providing access to digital heritage. Next to projects at Sound and Vision, Oomen works on international collaborative projects such as AI4MEDIA, Europeana XX, CLARIAH, and ReTV. He has a background in information science, media studies and computer science, and his current research focuses on exploring the potential of digital cultural heritage in the wider Cultural and Creative Industries. He is a board member of the Europeana Foundation, the EUscreen Foundation and the PublicSpaces Foundation.
—
Marco Rendina is senior consultant in charge of international projects at Istituto Luce – Cinecittà. Marco has been working for two decades with museums, archives and libraries across Europe, supporting them in their digital transformation, advocating for open access, gaining extensive experience in Digital Libraries design and implementation and fostering innovation in the cultural heritage sector in Europe. He is a member of the Board of Directors in various international cultural heritage organisations and networks, like the European Fashion Heritage Association, the Jewish Heritage Network and the EUscreen Foundation.
He has been appointed Chair of the Europeana Aggregators Forum from 2018 to 2021, and he is currently a member of the Advisory Board of the Europeana Foundation.
Through a glass darkly: How metadata can distort our view of the archive – and how we can correct it
by Tim Manders & Mari Wigham
Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
Metadata is the lens through which we view an archive. Without metadata, we are blind. As the amount – and quality – of metadata increases, our archive comes into focus. However, metadata is not a perfect lens.
Metadata is usually incomplete. Metadata is often heterogeneous – e.g. a TV programme requires different metadata than a newspaper article. Metadata is produced by different sources, each of which has its biases. For example, limited human capacity influences archival policy on selection and annotation, creating a bias towards the contemporary view of what – and who – is important. Or AI for detecting faces may incorrectly identify people of certain races if its training set was insufficiently diverse. Finally, how metadata is created changes over time. All these factors distort our view of the archive.
Traditionally, metadata serves to find items. Metadata distortion means we are more likely to find item A than item B, and miss item C completely. This distortion is not random, so it will structurally affect related items. For example, a particular group in society may be found less often, and therefore underrepresented in the final view of the archive.
Increasingly, metadata is used to answer questions about society, for example, in a data story investigating the media representation of politicians during elections. In this case, we risk misinterpreting patterns as meaningful trends, when in fact they come from the underlying metadata distortion. For example, do we find fewer women because the media underrepresents women, or because our AI misses them.
In this presentation, we explain our work to discover and document metadata distortions. We aim to raise awareness among archive users, so they understand what they do and don’t see. We will also discuss ways of both compensating for historical metadata distortions, and, where possible, avoiding distortions in the future.
Tim Manders works at the Exploration department of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. He is experienced in operationalising automatic annotation techniques such as speaker labeling, thesaurus label extraction and face recognition, applied on daily ingest into the archive with the purpose of pinpointing fine grained access points into our collection items.
—
Mari Wigham is a data engineer at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, working on innovative ways of helping researchers to work with the archive. She studied electronic engineering, and has spent her career working in applied research institutes, on projects ranging from virtual avatars to make television accessible to deaf people, to personalised food advice for helping people make healthier choices. Her current work at Sound and Vision combines her experience in the media with her knowledge of semantic technology, to unlock media archives for researchers and provide them with new insights from the data.
Our challenges to preserve and to serve UHD contents in various formats
by Yo Narita
Archives Division, Rights & Archives Management Center, Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK)
In this presentation, I would like to introduce the best practice of our latest UHD archiving.
Over the past few years, NHK archives have been tackling both technological and managemental issues regarding the preservation of the highest quality content.
NHK Archives has been proud to have one of the most advanced systems in broadcast archives. We have been successful in preserving and serving HD (High Definition/2K) content online, which boosted the use of archival footage in our programs.
As we entered the UHD (Ultra-High Definition/4K and 8K) era, we managed to start archiving UHD playout files on the same online system. The renewal took place in October 2019, about a year after the inauguration of the 4K/8K broadcast.
However, we faced completely new equipment and workflow for UHD production. The higher the quality, the larger and more complex the data. There are a variety of combinations of file formats, color gamut and dynamic ranges. As an archive, playout files are not the only materials that we need to preserve.
Our goal as an archive is to make sure that we preserve all the video materials as well as metadata. That is for re-run, re-production, and in terms of cultural heritages. Then we need to organize them to provide with user-friendly interface and in an efficient workflow. Finally, we need to do all this at a reasonable cost.
To achieve this goal, we have come to adopt realistic approaches to deal with the challenges.
I would like to present some interesting topics and details, including:
- difficulties and uniqueness of handling UHD footage.
- how we reached a consensus to preserve unedited UHD footage in LTOs.
- how we tried to achieve both cost and risk minimization.
We strongly believe sharing our experiences will be valuable for our colleagues in the archiving community.
2020/9-Present, System Engineer for Archives Information System in Archives Division, Rights & Archives Management Center, NHK
2014/7-2020/9, System project manager for broadcast playout systems in Engineering Administration Department, NHK
2011/5-2014/7, broadcast engineer at Kushiro Station, NHK 2011/4, Joined NHK
2011/3, Received Master’s degree in Information Science and Technology from Hokkaido University, Japan
The “Unboxing Mayibuye Project”: Cooperation project to better preserve & enhance access to Mayibuye collections
by Mariki Victor & Thomas Monteil
Robben Island Museum & INA
The Unboxing Mayibuye Project was launched in 2022 as a 3-year cooperation project between the Robben Island Museum (RIM) and INA. It is funded by the French Development Agency (Agence Française de Développement). The RIM has a Collections Unit (Mayibuye Archives) based at the University of the Western Cape. The project’s aim: unbox the Mayibuye collections, which are made of archival documents (video, sounds, films, and also artefacts, historical papers and photographs) relating to the South African and international fight against apartheid. The RIM, through the Mayibuye Archives’, aims to enhance the preservation and management of its collections and to imagine new ways of giving access to this national and world heritage.
To do so, INA, as a Technical Partner, will support RIM by providing audits, consulting and training services. One of the core outcomes will be a pilot project consisting of materials selected from RIM’s vast collections to be digitized and on the basis of which will be designed a dedicated access action.
This presentation will allow you to discover what this collection contains and how the Unboxing Mayibuye project has been built to contribute to the sharing of this heritage, and beyond!
This page will be updated with Mariki Victor’s bio soon.
—
Thomas Monteil joined INA in 2010 as a sound engineer, specialist in the restoration of radio archives in the Technical Operations Department. Since 2020, he works as a project manager in the INA Expertise and Consulting department and designs, coordinates, and leads cooperation projects with national and international partners, including expertise, consulting and training. In the framework of his responsibilities, he is also in charge of the Digital Media Management teaching unit of the Audiovisual Heritage Master’s degree and intervenes during various professional training courses.
Case study: AI archive indexing: Assessing and selecting AI services – what happens next?
by Kathey Battrick
Asharq News
AI indexing is not a magical quick-fix that will resolve all your metadata needs. Indeed, it will most likely create new challenges! So, how do you go about determining your requirements and selecting the indexing services you require? What happens in practice, once AI Indexing services are in place? A year in to their AI indexing project, Asharq News will provide an overview of their use of AI within the archive.
Kathey Battrick joined Asharq News in 2019 as a Senior Manager in the Library and Media Management Department. She is responsible for setting up and leading the media library at Asharq, overseeing the management, cataloguing, AI indexing and preservation of the organization’s valuable production assets and archive.
She has a wealth of experience in media and archive management and previously worked as the Director of Operations for ITN Source, the archive and clips sales arm of ITN News in London, where she led projects such as the digitization of ITN’s archive and managed the archive operations team.
Questions your AI can’t answer: The limitations of AI and data analysis
by Mari Wigham & Rana Klein
Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
Archive data offers a wealth of information that can be used to answer a wide range of questions. For example, to analyse the guest lists of TV programmes to see how the representation of demographic groups changes over time. Or to count the occurrences of locations in wartime newspapers to investigate the geopolitical balance in the reports. This type of quantitative analysis can be performed on a much larger number of archive items than a researcher could reasonably analyse by hand.
AI goes a step further, in not only analysing and aggregating existing data, but learning to create new metadata, and even draw inferences from it. For instance, AI can learn to recognise faces to see who appears in a video, or to classify news articles into categories. A well trained AI can even detect the sentiment expressed in a piece of text.
With these techniques, it may seem that any possible question can be answered. However, there are important limitations. For example, it is easy to search for the term ‘European Union’ in text, but hard to discover how the concept of a union of European countries evolved, when this may have been described in many different ways. It is challenging to distinguish if the sentence ‘That’s a really good idea’ was said sarcastically. Finally, an important question is how representative an analysis of archive material is, given that it is a curated selection.
At Sound and Vision, we are developing support for researchers who aim to answer research questions with quantitative data. In this presentation, we will share our experiences of the questions we can answer, and the ones we can’t, and why. We will also discuss how we are investigating the concept of data stories that combine the traditional qualitative research methods with quantitative analysis to get the best out of both.
Mari Wigham is a data engineer at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, working on innovative ways of helping researchers to work with the archive. She studied electronic engineering, and has spent her career working in applied research institutes, on projects ranging from virtual avatars to make television accessible to deaf people, to personalised food advice for helping people make healthier choices. Her current work at Sound and Vision combines her experience in the media with her knowledge of semantic technology, to unlock media archives for researchers and provide them with new insights from the data.
—
Rana Klein works as an AI developer at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. She develops, benchmarks and implements algorithms to enrich archival data. Those enrichments increase the findability of content and open new quantitative opportunities for researchers. Rana graduated from the Master of Logic in 2017. This gave her a fundamental philosophical and mathematical background together with an interdisciplinary mindset.She puts both of these to good use solving real-life problems with artificial intelligence.
The legacy we leave behind as archivists
by Karen du Toit
SABC
The SABC Radio Archive preserve the audio archives for the South African Broadcasting Corporation, the national public broadcaster in South Africa. SABC has 19 radio stations, and legacy material, of which the audio needs to be preserved for future generations. We have a large collection of analogue audio carriers, which still need to be digitised, but since 2012 we have been preserving the audio digitally on servers. The radio collection in the SABC Radio Archives spans more than one hundred years. A future Enterprise Digital Library (EDL) is in the pipeline, which will encompass a MAM system for all the archives in the SABC.
2020 brought its own challenges to the SABC Archives. It led to thoughts about the legacy we, as each archivist, leave behind in an archive. It is perhaps a tongue-in-cheek look at the challenges encountered searching for material, but it is also a reminder to all of us, myself included, to think about the legacy you personally leave behind. The programmes you choose to catalogue, the programmes you leave on the backlog shelf, the metadata you use, your own personal filter when cataloguing, and the gaps you leave when you are busy with a project. These are but a few examples, and I hope to discuss them with the conferencegoers and invite them to share their own.
As archivists, we would all like to get the following mention as Margaret C. Norton, an archivist instrumental in the archival profession in the 1940s and 50s: “[her] most important contributions to the archival profession, she gave a sense of respect and professionalism that others had been trying to give but had not had her wide reach. She was crucial in establishing the legitimacy of the archival profession in its formative years in the United States.”
Audio Archivist | Librarian
Let’s play: Designing the preservation of interactive games
by Patrick McIntyre
National Film and Sound Archive of Australia
Many audiovisual institutions around the world are grappling with the rapid growth of video games as a dominant entertainment and cultural form. The challenges are numerous and complex, from the technological to the industrial and cultural. They range from issues of digital storage to dependencies on proprietary systems to more philosophical questions around evolution of narrative form, social connection and aesthetics.
Globally, the games industry generated USD 178bn in 2021 – more than the music and movie industries combined – and with continued steep growth projected.
In Australia, games are played by over two thirds of the population, with 74% reporting that games help foster social connections, and 80% reporting that games have a positive impact on emotional wellbeing. Games are now the second most popular form of entertainment in Australian households behind streaming movie and tv services (and ahead of free to air services).
In 2019, the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) began pro-actively collecting games alongside film, television, music, radio and other audiovisual forms. Working in collaboration with games developers, industry bodies and peer cultural institutions, it has pioneered new ways of understanding games as a cultural form, and how the history of games can be preserved. Beginning in 2022, the institution will begin collecting games produced in Australia assisted by government investment as part of funding contracts, cementing a shift away from games collecting as a ‘pilot’ exercise to ‘business as usual’.
NFSA is confident that an emerging network of institutions around the world will begin to collaboratively address these unique challenges of collecting and preserving games and interactive media according to the specific interests, specialisation and capacities of each.
This presentation will raise – if not always settle! – various issues in relation to the collecting of games and interactive media.
Patrick is an Australian cultural leader with over 30 years’ experience. Prior to joining the NFSA as CEO, he served as Executive Director of the Sydney Theatre Company for over 11 years. Earlier roles include Associate Executive Director of The Australian Ballet, General Manager of Sydney Film Festival and Marketing Manager of Sydney Opera House Trust and of Sydney Dance Company.
As a producer, he has worked on a variety of projects including the world premiere of Muriel’s Wedding the Musical; Sydney Theatre Company’s The Present on Broadway; and in 2007, The Nutcracker Live – a live via satellite broadcast of a performing arts event into cinemas, which was the first of its kind in Australia.
Patrick has also worked as a freelance music and entertainment writer and has presented at numerous conferences in Australia and internationally.
Digitizing images from the first tests of HDTV in Europe: The 1992 Winter and Summer Olympic Games
by Sabine Haller-Neumann, Etienne Marchand & Michel Merten
Olympic Foundation for Culture and Heritage / International Olympic Committee, INA & Memnon
By the end of the ’80s, the first HDTV images were produced in Europe based on an experimental analogue standard of 1250 lines/50Hz. In this context, the 1992 Winter and Summer Olympic Games were the perfect stage to showcase this new way of video production and transmission. For the occasion, over 40 HDTV cameras were deployed with their support systems and facilities to produce more than 200h of HDTV content.
30 years later, these images have been digitized thanks to the efforts of the Olympic Foundation for Culture and Heritage, responsible for managing the IOC’s audio-visual heritage, from acquisition to preservation, and to making it accessible to its internal and external partners.
The project, developed with the technical support of INA and Memnon, covers the digitization of 138 D1 tapes (single and dual) and 380 1-inch HD1250 tapes.
The technical challenge involved the use of obsolete technology for playing back the legacy carriers while finding innovative ways to reconstruct the High Definition pictures using modern tools. The experimental nature of those recordings also caused a few unexpected issues that had to be dealt with during the process of migration. This all resulted in a very specific workflow that was tailored to accommodate those rare constraints.
During the session, we will share some of the images as well as the technical challenges described.
Sabine Haller-Neumann is working as Senior Manager of the Images & Sounds Archives at the Olympic Foundation for Culture and Heritage (DPT of the International Olympic Committee, Lausanne).
She graduated with a Bachelor’s (1995) and a Master’s in Information science (Geneva University, 1999) and worked as a librarian/documentalist in public and media libraries and as well as museums during the ’90s.
She worked for 7 years as an archive specialist and project manager in charge of document management in Telco company and got certified in project management (PMP, Prince2).
She joined the International Olympic Committee in 2007 as project and team manager within the Patrimonial Assets Management (PAM) Program, specifically in charge of organizing documentation of all photo and audiovisual archives and setting up together with IT & external providers a tailor-made archive preservation and publication platform.
Since 2019, she has been coordinating projects and operations within the Images and Sounds archives, managing a team of 18 preservation specialists and special task forces for Olympic Games activities.
—
Graduated from EICAR in 2008 after training as a sound engineer, Etienne Marchand has since been working on a great variety of archive documents – audio, video and film – and on every aspect of the technical workflows: assessment, cleaning and physical restoration of audiovisual carriers; digitisation using manual and automatic processes; digital restoration and colour grading; quality control; conversions and transcoding; media delivery; digital archiving.
Etienne joined INA in 2015 as an operations executive within the Preservation, Delivery and Digital Archiving service. He’s currently working as a multimedia engineer on the design of new workflows, monitoring the digital media intake and on new methods for handling legacy formats.
—
In 2004, Michel founded Memnon Archiving Services to address the challenge of the preservation of and access to the audiovisual heritage. Memnon innovated the audiovisual digitization market by developing new methodologies to allow large-scale digitization at affordable cost. Michel grew the company into the leading global service provider in the field. Since the acquisition of the company by ES Broadcast group, Michel continues to support Memnon activities in its global business development activities and to represent the Company in professional organizations.
Archive in the clouds
by Raquel Nunes
Globo
Acervo Globo’s cloudification project aims to move the backup of our files to the cloud. We understand that such initiative provides greater cost efficiency, better access and more security for our content. Even with the high investment involved in moving to the cloud, the cloudification of Acervo Globo is an economically attractive project, as we no longer buy LTO media, and depend on the costs of an outsourced company that previously stored our security backup. The project flow is designed so that in case of failure to access some content on the main instance, our first instance backup (saved on media inside Acervo) is activated. The same content is only restored from cloud, our second instance backup, in case of a problem with the first one. Using the cloud only as disaster recovery, we mitigate the high cost of retrieving material from the cloud. Other gain is the greater ease of access to content. With the cloud, restoring content is now just a click away, whereas before it could take from one day to the other for the content to be accessible. In addition to efficiency, we gained a lot in security, as the media no longer runs the risk of physical displacement – that was previously necessary to arrive from the outsourced company to our archive. Another possible gain associated with the project is the use of technical resources that cloud provides, such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Training machines to identify Globo talents, for example, would allow for automatic indexing of characters in the treatment of our products, enriching the metadata and adding value to our content without burdening the teams. The cloud and its countless resources are part of a world that is now unfolding for Acervo Globo, showing all its possibilities – and also limitations.
Graduated in both History (UFF) and Communication (UFRJ), with a master degree in Social History of Culture (PUC-Rio), Raquel has been working since 2012 at the Archive Department of Globo, Brazil´s largest TV network. Along the years, she played different rolls as researcher, coordinator and, since 2020, specialist of archive. Among other challenges, she is involved with integrating, aligning and giving support to the six different sites where Acervo Globo is located, pushing foward modernization efforts.
Political Ecologies and the Precarious Archive
by Juana Suárez
New York University
This workshop seeks to crowdsource ideas from archives that have historically worked in a context of scarcity and lack of funding on how they have handled/are handling to establish green practices. The “precarity pride” that is often emphasized by colleagues who succeed in managing collections, getting results, and giving access against every financial odd is often taken for granted and hardly revised to the light of sustainable green practices. Precarity is a concept that demands more politicization in archives because it also leads to job insecurity and stability that is detrimental to workers. Hence, the workshop does not aim to undermine the responsibility we have as archivists/activists for funding, fair hiring practices, and job-related issues. Yet, we look at how precarity is a source of fluid spaces of innovation. In this way, we rethink how the constant concern with saving, repurposing, repairing, searching for DIY solutions, and many other practices that are characteristic of institutions in countries with poor economies, counter archives, and minor archives can be examined in the light of contemporary ecological practices and can make many contributions in our attempts to foster green archives.
Juana Suárez: Director of the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program at New York University. She is a Latin American Cinema scholar and a media preservation specialist. Author of Cinembargo Colombia: Critical Essays on Colombian Cinema (Spanish 2009, English translation 2012), and Sites of Contention: Cultural Production and the Discourse of Violence in Colombia; co-editor of Humor in Latin American Cinema (2015); translator to Spanish of A Comparative History of Latin American Cinema by Paul A. Schroeder-Rodríguez (2020). She is currently working on a book tentatively entitled Moving Images Archives, Cultural History and The Digital Turn in Latin America.
Film newsreels and human rights: challenges associated with cataloguing, access and distribution
by Carol Sabbadini
Señal Memoria-RTVC
Film newsreel collections kept by institutions responsible for the protection of the audio-visual heritage are frequently the most significant and outstanding documents of the archives of these institutions due to their great historical, political and cultural value, although at the same time they also present one of the most complex challenges in terms of cataloguing, distribution and use, primarily if we are talking about sensitive material which may result in actions violating human rights.
The Señal Memoria archive currently holds a remarkable film newsreel collection. Among the film newsreels of particular importance is Noticiero de las 7 (N7), an extremely important Colombian newsreel, which was regularly broadcast every night at 7 pm from Monday to Friday between 1984 and 2001.
The significance of this film newsreel lies in its innovative format and content: it is a priceless heritage for the reconstruction of Colombia’s historical memory.
These documents contain several of the most significant events in the country’s history, for example, the occupation of the Palace of Justice, the Armero tragedy, the expansion of the Medellín and Cali drug cartels and their leaders, among them Pablo Escobar and Rodríguez Orejuela, the evolution of the Colombian armed conflict, the various efforts at peace talks, the demobilization of M-19, among others.
Beginning with a case study of this newsreel containing approximately 7000 hours of audio-visual material, mainly original camera footage in Betacam and Umatic format, in the course of the presentation I cover the work done so far during cataloguing, the challenges arising during the processing and distribution process, which concerns the production of metadata, historical analysis, terminological research, the ethical dimensions of the use and publication of sensitive information in public ownership, which can be used in court proceedings as testimony, proof and evidential material.
Carol Sabbadini is a restorer and conservator of the artistic and cultural heritage, and an artist. She has an MA in History of Art and Visual Arts from the Bologna University (Italy), and is specialized in management of audio-visual heritage. She was awarded a master’s degree in the Language of Contemporary Image (photography, transdisciplinary practice, video art) at Fondazione Fotografia Modena (Italy). Advisor in charge of the area of Management of Audiovisual and Sound Collections of Señal Memoria of RTVC Public Media System of Colombia. From 2016 to 2020, she was advisor on the use plan and the management model of the New Cinematheque of Bogotá and since its inauguration coordinator of the Creation and Experimentation area.
Traces of the perception of the female world in Italy in public television: cues for potential educational studies for gender equity
by Daniela Floris & Margherita Sechi
RAI
There is a lot of talk about gender equality with regard to the social position of women. In Italy there is a feminicide emergency, and a lot is being done to achieve equality, also in the working world. Even if the situation is improving, this goal still appears, to some extent, quite far away. The problem is first of all cultural and comes from afar.
The RAI Archive offers important evidence on how TV has approached women, in programmes explicitly dedicated to women, but also and especially in programmes in which they are not the chosen subject of the investigation, but emerge as an involuntary presence, regardless of the topic.
There are many traces, over time, of how television has, even unconsciously, but following deep-rooted social conceptions, recorded the female world, women’s relations with society, family, work, health and the opposite sex. These testify an undoubtedly patriarchal culture, as well as a growing awareness, also by the media, that something had to be changed. These multiple traces, if effectively rendered, could be used for educational purposes in schools, but also in workplaces, where there seems to be still a long way to go in terms of women’s rights.
Our presentation, far from claiming to be explanatory or exhaustive, aims to be a cue to show the potential research opening up, starting from programmes which were not specifically dedicated to the subject under investigation, whatever it may be.
A vast television archive like this, if questioned by experts such as sociologists, psychologists, researchers in the field of custom history, with scientific methods and aims, can provide material of high importance, visually supporting possible causes of many phenomena related to women in the present society.
Graduated in literature/ethnomusicology at La Sapienza University, Rome, 1990.
Documentator and archivist at Rai Teche since 1992.
Responsible of the archiving methodologies and of the quality control and certification of the documentation of the TV programs of the daily flow and of the historical heritage. Responsible for the portal of Teche related to the Italian Folklore Archive. In 2019, I attended the FIAT/IFTA conference in Dubrovnik with the presentation “Historical-geographical Documentary in RAI”. In 2017 I attended the IASA conference in Berlin sith the presentation ” Historical-geographical Documentary in RAI “Archiving the Rai collection of traditional folk culture”.
Since March 2019 member of the FIAT/IFTA Media Studies Commission.
—
I am a Rai Teche archivist, for the Italian broadcaster RAI Radiotelevisione Italiana.
My activity has developed over time through the documentation of audiovisual material, the analysis, and adaptation of TV archives in the transition from text archives to their evolution in multimedia form. I am also a Supervisor for Quality Control Documentation and a specialist researcher on archives. In 2019, I attended the FIAT-IFTA conference in Dubrovnik with the presentation “Making accessible cultural heritage” to celebrate the centenary of Fausto Coppi’s birth. Since October 2017, I’m in charge of the Rai Teche TV archive area in Milan, which today also includes a large photographic archive. Since this year, I have been a member of the Fiat-Ifta MMC committee.
Who Says Archives are Boring? The National Archives of Singapore and Speaking the Language of Children
by June Pok & Cassandra Tang
National Archives of Singapore
The National Archives of Singapore (NAS) has always been active in connecting with the community, with a full calendar of public talks and programmes for the young and old. The Covid-19 pandemic, however, upended everything. Because of restrictions in group sizes and activities permitted in the Archives, the NAS had to re-examine its outreach efforts from 2020.
In response, the NAS revamped its suite of offerings by creating online programmes which include introducing children to the work of the Archives. These programmes were specially designed to intrigue and excite young minds such as a ‘day in the life of a conservator’ experience.
The NAS will share its outreach efforts and reveal how it continues to educate members of the public about Singapore’s history and heritage in fun and novel ways. Learn how the NAS worked around the challenges of Covid-19 restrictions to bring their signature children’s programme into homes during the height of the pandemic, and how conservators quickly pivoted back to in-person programmes for children once safe distancing measures were eased in 2021.
June Pok is an Assistant Audiovisual Archivist with the Audio Visual Archives department. She was previously part of the Outreach team, where she helped to organise and run children’s programmes at the National Archives of Singapore and Former Ford Factory.
—
Cassandra Tang is an Assistant Conservator at the National Archives of Singapore. Apart from carrying out conservation treatments for historical records at the Archives Conservation Lab and supporting the collections and exhibitions at the National Archives of Singapore, National Library and the Former Ford Factory, Cassandra also supports Outreach efforts.
Final Account, Third Reich testimonies: An archival and production project
by Claude Mussou
INA
Final Account: Third Reich Testimonies is both a production and archival project initiated and directed by Luke Holland (ZEF Productions Ltd,) in association with University College London (UCL), the Wiener Holocaust Library, the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (France) with the support of Founding Partners and Pears Foundation.
Final Account as a documentary film was directed and produced by Luke Holland (1948-2020). It is based on the testimonies of last living participants in the Third Reich’s war crimes. The film premiered at Venice International Film Festival in September 2020, a couple of months after Luke Holland died.
In parallel to the film production process, an archive was built which contains life story interviews conducted by Luke Holland between 2008 and 2017, with men and women in several countries, including Germany, Austria, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Paraguay, Argentina, Romania, Spain, and Ukraine. The intention was to revive their memories of, and involvement in, Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and the Second World War. It comprises 295 filmed interviews, around 500 hours, with 274 men and women born between 1905 and 1934, mainly Germans and Austrians, who occupied a range of positions on a wide spectrum of responsibility. Their interviews trigger reflections on responsibility, complicity, and justice, of ‘ordinary’ people who were implicated in, witnesses to, or on the periphery of war and genocide.
The archival collection Final Account: Third Reich Testimonies is accessible for purposes of research, education, and memorialisation at the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA), UCL, and the Wiener Holocaust Library on behalf of ZEF Productions Ltd.
Claude has been coordinating the services that accompany and trigger academic usage of INA’s archive for several years. Along with several colleagues at INA, she has been developing the Lab program after she graduated from a dedicated Executive Master in Digital Humanities (SciencesPo, Paris).
Digital Transformation in Broadcast Archives: Marrying theory and practice – the journey so far.
by Bríd Dooley
RTÉ
Digital Transformation is the buzzword of every business and sector today as they seek to adapt to and seize the huge opportunities of the digital connected era, to not only survive but thrive. While digital technologies are the driving force of this change, digital transformation of a broadcast archive from its traditional business model is much more than the sum of the technologies and their application. It is about whole new way of working and thinking about the business of archives, identifying, and applying the appropriate technologies and processes which involves a whole of organsation approach including collaborative working, continuous review and evaluation, innovation, and change aligned to a clear vision and purpose.
RTÉ Archives began with a business case developed and honed over years to seek the funding and support necessary to create and build a digital archive with the mission of both preserving the past, safeguarding the future, and providing better access and services for all stakeholders through digital services. Building on this mission, the RTÉ Archives is now firmly on a programme of change. Marrying Theory and practice in digital transformation will chart the digital transformation journey so far, our approach through collaborative working, learning and a business strategy to develop and build a continually evolving digital archive service that can grow and thrive.
Bríd Dooley is Head of Archives for RTÉ, Ireland’s national public service media organisation, with a career spanning over 30 years in both the UK and Ireland, as well as being an active member of a number of professional international association networks.
As Department Head, she is currently focused on the development of the digital archive as part of RTÉ’s overall digital transformation strategy, ensuring the long-term preservation of all legacy, current and future digital collections which span over nine decades of continuous broadcasting history.
She is actively committed to growing the value and use of the archives for all stakeholders, including the application of new technologies across the archival services, providing public access via curated publications on www.rte.ie/archives and engaging in a range of partnership activities with cultural institutions and organisations.
Audiences, Algorithms and Archive: The challenges of curating the BBC’s Archive social channels
by Amy McGarrigle & Gary Milne
BBC
The BBC has been resurfacing archive via social media since 2015. In that time, the digital landscape has evolved, with expectations from audiences, platforms and society shifting constantly. Our approach to curation has been forced to adapt, as we learned from the successes, and occasional mis-steps, on our accounts.
In this presentation we will highlight some achievements and discuss what we think those have taught us about online audience engagement with archive. But we also feel we have lots to still understand and we will discuss some of the challenges we face, and how we approach those.
We will debate the changing audience attitudes and how content that was deemed appropriate for social at one time, can be problematic in a changing societal context. Archive is not immune to ‘cancel culture’ and current political sensitivities. It’s always a careful balancing act but the insights gained from the vocal engagement can be useful.
Using third party platforms to surface archive leaves us at the mercy of their algorithmic priorities. Just as important are the considerations around giving external companies access to our content. Our archive YouTube Channel has raised questions around the value of meeting audiences where they are versus driving them to the BBC estate. And what to do when some of your biggest viral hits get ripped? The risks of poor reaction from fans have the potential to negate any positive engagement.
The ever-changing digital and social landscape means one can never fully master the social media beast. We are currently debating accessibility and diversity challenges, and the perennial conundrum of how to reflect UK audiences using an archive that may not have been fully reflective of society in the past. In this presentation we will discuss how a small team attempts to rise to the challenges, we will share some of our learnings and we will encourage sharing of others’ experiences in the Q&A.
Amy McGarrigle is an award-winning Producer with experience across digital and radio output for the BBC. She currently leads the team that has grown the hugely popular BBC Archive social channels and has also worked on archive projects involving VR, audio and interactive digital products.
—
Gary Milne is an Assistant Producer on the BBC Archive Content & Partnerships after previously having worked in the archives at STV. He has worked on archive-led short-form videos across the BBC site for News, Sport and BBC Ideas and currently helps curate content for BBC Archive’s successful Social Media feeds. He also worked on the Berlin Blitz VR project which used a 1943 radio broadcast as the basis for an immersive VR experience which has been well received at the Edinburgh Festival and at South By Southwest as well as reaching a massive audience worldwide. He recently produced a number of archive focused radio programmes and podcasts for BBC World Service and BBC Radio 4.