FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2024

The presentation will focus on how the propaganda machinery and disinformation-saturated media landscape that characterised Ceausescu’s totalitarian regime in communist Romania constructed a specific epistemic positioning of individuals that undermined, weakened or obliterated their disposition to make reliable judgements about whom, what and when to trust. While histories of media in (former) totalitarian regimes have paid ample attention to propaganda and censorship, less – if hardly any – attention has been paid to how such mechanisms of disinformation have worked to compromise the epistemic autonomy of people who have lived through such political regimes. This overlooked element in the anatomy of propaganda, namely the epistemic positioning of people in an environment where - as Hannah Arendt (1951) would describe it - “everything was possible, and nothing was true”, can offer insights into the most urgent casualties and liabilities in today’s struggles against disinformation.  

Using oral testimonies, Securitate files and press clippings from the time, I will illustrate how under Ceausescu’s totalitarian regime, the effectiveness of propaganda consisted primarily of people’s disbelief of the regime’s lies, while simultaneously believing that nothing and no one could be trusted and everything was possible. This compromised epistemic autonomy has been a lingering after-effect in post-communist Romanian society. It is this persistence to the present day of a compromised epistemic autonomy rooted within a history of propaganda and disinformation, a persistence that goes on despite the present-day pluriform, independent and alternative systems of information, which is most interesting in understanding the finest mechanisms of how disinformation affects people’s reliance on others in the pursuit of truth and how disinformation ultimately relies on compromised basic social relations.

This presentation investigates the potential for better contextualising past histories of audiovisual (AV) collections in institutional metadata and explores possibilities for increased community engagement and knowledge co-creation. It will reflect on the process and results of the recent research project TRACE (Tracking Radio Archival Collections in Europe, 1930-1960) to consider further future pathways for integrating contextual information about the historical impact of war, conflict and political change (e.g. before and after World War II) on AV collections.

Drawing from the TRACE project framework that identified how AV archives have been subject to major disruptions and damage (e.g. to physical carriers/content, archival documentation, broadcast buildings/storage spaces, and continuities of staff/knowledge), this talk will take up several short examples to explore the extent to which new insights can be gleaned from existing metadata.

Considering the growing popularity of podcasts due to their inherent convenience for consumption in areas such as deepening knowledge and entertainment, and taking the example of the Rai Play Sound platform, where original podcasts can be found, in addition to the radio offering of new and/or repertoire programs, we will analyse, through concrete examples, the methods and verification processes implemented by Rai’s Rights Management Department when rights clearances are requested in order to use archive material in new in-house or third parties podcast productions.

We will examine the different types of contracts, from the oldest ones, which only provided for radio and television rights, to the newest ones where exploitation within podcasts is already provided for in the contractual clauses, explaining what risks we take and why. Rights Management Department follows Rai’s Legal Department’s guidelines , but its decisions are also the result of comparisons and evaluations made for each individual case based on various factors: whether internal use or commercialization of the podcast is envisaged; the nature of the repertoire requested (movies, entertainment, investigations, sports, etc.); whether the podcast consists of the full retransmission of a program already broadcasted or whether the material must be inserted into a new work.

We will also discuss cases where the Fair Use principle can be applied for the free use of archives (for example, for purposes of criticism, comment, information, teaching, instruction, or research).

During the presentation, we will show some specific and potentially critical cases, discussing how we behave in the presence of material protected by copyright and agreements between Rai and collecting societies.

In 2018 DR Archive was facing big changes. For five years DR Archive had made a lot of outreach activities meeting users outside the archive on different festivals and events. But the archive was split into two divisions in 2018, and the physical events had to stop. Instead, we got the opportunity to write articles about DR history, telling stories about how DR made programs back in time with clips from old programs. From 2019 to 2023 the site views grew from about 50.000 to 250.000.

The site was a pilot project, and its future was uncertain. But in March 2024 DR launched a new archive universe with curated archive programs on the main tv streaming platform. As a part of the promotion of the archive content, the article site with DR history has got a new and important role as a communication platform for the content. I would like to present this positive development from pilot project to a central tool in DR’s new archive investment.

This article explores an innovative approach to the long-term preservation of documents housed in the Folklore Archive of the Romanian Academy, examining the concept through three distinct metaphors: the zoo, the seed-bank, and guerrilla gardening. It proposes that each metaphor offers a unique perspective on preservation strategies.

The "zoo" metaphor emphasizes the idea of reintroducing previously captured research materials back into the wild, allowing for a more dynamic interaction with the public. The "seed-bank" metaphor positions the archive as a living database, serving future generations by preserving the genetic material of cultural heritage. Lastly, the "guerrilla gardening" metaphor suggests the use of "seed bombing" tactics to combat the erosion of intangible cultural heritage, proposing a proactive and dispersed approach to preservation trough small memory boxes. This boxes should be highly customized gifts for the communities from where the recordings were captured.

The analysis critically reflects on these metaphors, which were introduced a decade ago, to assess their viability and impact on contemporary preservation practices. The discussion will be enhanced by the presentation of an updated working model of a small memory box, a wooden encased device that plays old Transylvanian audio recordings.

This session will explore how the BFI approached its largest ever rights clearance project, researching over 30,000 titles and clearing rights for 13,000 film and TV works for a new streaming service in UK libraries, BFI Replay, as part of the recently completed Heritage 2022 programme. I'll show how we devised our approach to compliance & risk across the multiple layers of rights and the different categories of rights holders and works, and the tools, processes and policies we developed to support this work and the results we achieved. I'll share some of the main obstacles we faced, like the information gap, and how we engaged with rights holders and consider some of the longer term challenges that can be created by project driven rights work.

Currently, the legal deposit for film productions in South Korea is mainly limited to theater releases that have been rated by the Korea Media Rating Board. On the other hand, the amendment to the Act on the Promotion of Motion Pictures and Video Products allows platforms and content providers to self-rate content released on the over-the-top(OTT). Content that is self-rated by the provider is not subject to legal deposit after release. Recently, the OTT industries have continued to develop, but OTT content that is outside the scope of the legal deposit system has not been preserved. Therefore, it is necessary to explore alternatives for collecting and archiving OTT content that is in the gaps of national collection and management.

In 2023, Korean Film Archive (KOFA) conducted a survey to identify the current status of content storage in OTT content producers and platforms and gather opinions from those in the field. Through this, KOFA examines the necessity of collecting OTT content, what to preserve, and how to collect it. In this study, a total of 21 face-to-face interviews were conducted with a group of stakeholders from content producers and platforms, policy makers, and researchers. Questions were asked about the production environments of major OTT providers, the types, genres, and topics of content they produce, the current state of production data management, key issues, and how the public sector can support them. The survey focused on the need for archiving at the national level, prerequisites for introducing a public OTT content archiving system, and whether public archiving is necessary to promote and foster the OTT industries. Based on stakeholder interviews, the study summarizes what to preserve OTT content and how to acquire it efficiently. The study finally suggests directions and implementation strategies to preserve OTT content for national audiovisual heritage safeguarding.

INA is a French public company whose first mission is to preserve and develop a vast collection of audiovisual and audio archives from French public radios and TV channels.

Due to the quantity of rights managed and the large number of rightsholders in the collection of INA’s archives, exploiting it involves taking risks.

In order to limit risk exposure, INA has developed a politic of collective agreement conclusion with CMOs (for the authors rights) and unions (for the performers rights). In the same time, individual agreements are concluded / negotiated with third-party property rights (rightsholders non-members of CMOs, coproducers, organizers of sports events / shows, multiple rightsholders of contents previously incorporated in INA’s archives (photo, phonograms, literary works, etc.).

INA’s Legal Department also have to deal with rights of the personality, image, freedom of expression, private life… and others (with the IA, RGPD).

Our purpose is to facilitate the work of our operational teams with clear guidelines on each subject. A legal team at the INA’s Legal Department is dedicated to the legal analysis of our contents with the perspective of an exploitation to manage the risk. INA has launched a project to create a SI which enables to combine the legal data on the contents and the royalties data in order to simplify the decision making. However, human intervention is still necessary to appreciate the risk and the opportunity of an exploitation.

The Timisoara Revolution Memorial Association was founded on April, 1990. Within the association operates the National Center for Documentation, Research and Public Information about the Romanian Revolution of 1989. Our institution has been declared an entity of national interest. By Decree No. 445/2019 we received the Order "Cultural Merit in the Rank of Knight", Category E - awarded by the President of Romania, Mr. Klaus Werner Iohannis.

Over the course of 34 years of activity, we have erected 14 monuments in memory of the martyr heroes of December 1989, founded a publishing house through which we have published over 50 volumes and a biannual scientific journal. We managed to build a vast and unique database in Romania that includes several sections: oral history, mass media, documents, statements, press collections and photos.

The main purpose is to honor the memory of the martyr heroes of 1989, restore the historical truth, and to promote the culture of local remembrance through local, national and international exhibitions (permanent and temporary), book launches, theater performances, workshops and conferences, talk shows, lectures, film screenings, award ceremonies, particularly aimed at the young generation, schoolchildren and students. We consider it a priority mission to present the historical truth primarily to the younger generations as a legacy in the culture of memory. In order to extend our collections and enrich our educational work we are now adding archive moving footage from other countries to our exhibitions, for example archive from the Austrian Broadcasting Cooperation.

In its strive for opening up its collections the ORF Multimedia Archives is always keen to provide its footage for interesting projects. Memorialul Revolutiei 1989 perfectly meets the criteria for a fruitful cooperation. Ruth Stifter-Trummer (ORF) shows some unique clips of the Rumanian Revolution from the ORF-archives which enhance the rich funds of the Memorial Association.

In 2022, Studio Silverback, Britain's leading natural history producers, proposed creating an online library of world-class footage of our changing planet for use in non-commercial climate and environmental projects and communications. The goal was to build a high-quality, scientifically accurate, and globally accessible collection of video assets, to be named "Open Planet", and make it available for free. This idea stemmed from frustration with broadcasters and streamers tightly controlling the rights to Silverback's documentary content, including unused rushes material, restricting its use by others.

Following a rapid project timeline which addressed investment, corporate structures, technological, rights and media management requirements, the beta library was launched in Autumn 2023 and has already made a significant impact. Footage has been used by a mix of audiences – from scientists and educators, to NGOs, activists and filmmakers – in multi-channel communications campaigns and events, including major global conferences such as COP28, the UN General Assembly and the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting.

The full global launch of Open Planet is scheduled for Spring 2024. In this presentation, Rights and Archive consultants from Northbound will explain the construction of the library and its current reach. Topics will include:

• Technology procurement and system build 
• Media management and metadata model 
• Rights negotiations and unlocking 
• Usage and impacts of the library 

Working in partnership with multiple archive collections owners across the regions and nations of the UK and a range of selected service providers, the National Lottery funded BFI Heritage 2022 video tape digitisation project devised a unique approach to the successful mass digitisation of over 100,000  video tapes, spanning every generation and format type.

This presentation will focus on the innovative work done to create a single Quality and Exceptions Methodology (QEM) document, prepared collaboratively between all project stakeholders to ensure that regardless of genre, format type or general condition, every title selected for digitisation would be catered for to meet exacting budgets and quality expectations for both preservation and access.

As well as the smooth flow for the majority of titles digitised, we will also explore the relatively small but not insignificant number of problematic tapes which comprised what were termed, 'exceptions' and some of the ways these too were successfully migrated from their obsolete carriers.

We will present results of combining the latest research in automatic speech recognition (ASR) with European high performance computing (HPC) and large quantities of raw audiovisual data contained in national radio and television archives. The aim of the work was two-fold, firstly, to advance ASR by building models on large public data collections and secondly, to harness the large audio-visual media archives for large-scale qualitative and quantitative media research by generating an automatic indexation based on all spoken content that is decoded by ASR. Only the largest global companies can have access both to the latest ASR development, huge computing resources and huge audio collections, but their commercial interests do not treat all languages equally.

In Europe, most languages are spoken in small countries which, however, have advanced radio and television archives containing millions of hours of broadcasted media content. The latest publicly funded HPC initiatives have also opened researchers an access to unprecedented computational resources. By utilizing the computing and archives it is possible for researchers to develop and publish large pre-trained speech models for many languages without depending on the commercial interests of the large global companies. The large speech models can be pre-trained in a self-supervised fashion which can benefit also from untranscribed and uncategorized audio collections. When openly published, these models make it then easy and quick to develop speech technology applications, such as accurate recognizers for ASR and speech, speaker and audio characteristics for these languages by fine-tuning the models using a feasible amount of transcribed target data.

Film archives safeguard and preserve physical media and digital files. However, the ecological impact is considerable. Today, in the midst of climate turmoil and uncertainty, we wonder about the balance between preserving the audiovisual memory of our species and mitigating its environmental impact, particularly in the Global South.  

The approach to two of the most consolidated institutional archives in Mexico and Colombia, has allowed us to learn more and compare the various economic and social factors that face the challenge of preservation and sustainability in our times. At the same time, it has allowed us to have more in depth knowledge of diverse Archive Managers’ perspectives on possible ecological strategies related to preservation.

Thus, we ask ourselves, to what extent film preservation strategies can be modified in relation to their environmental impact. Should the loss or non-rescue of certain films be assumed as a strategy of ecological care, in view of a future increasingly threatened by climate change? Can a more democratic access to film archives justify their carbon footprint, beyond the importance of safeguarding historical memory?

With these questions, we aim to delve into the grassroots innovation practices of film archives in relation to new preservation and dissemination strategies in response to climate upheaval and uncertainty. Thus, to reflect on the historical and colonial responsibility of the Global North towards the Global South, as well as on the decision-making process of these institutions in relation to smaller archives, pondering the ethical place of audiovisual memory preservation and its balance with ecological heritage conservation.

The project by Finland's national broadcaster Yle to digitize its 100,000-title video archive using NOA technology has successfully concluded this year. By adopting a variety of tools and workflow system of NOA after an EU-wide tender, Yle has modernized and preserved its extensive legacy SD-video library including various formats like Betacam, Digital Betacam, DVCAM, and 1-inch. The collaboration ensured the longevity and accessibility of crucial media content for future generations.

The paper presented by Pasi Ekman, Yle, and Manuel Corn, NOA, will delve into the strategic partnership between Yle and NOA, highlighting the technological advancements and workflow optimization facilitated at the core by NOA's tools FrameLector, QualityChecker, and the jobDB workflow system. It will explore the project's scope, including the digitization of various video formats and the complex integration with existing systems, to provide a comprehensive overview of the digitization effort's significance. This case study not only illustrates challenges of large-scale video archive conservation, like for example the need for a pragmatic method of video levelling within the lossless domain, but also showcases the innovative solutions deployed to overcome them, marking a significant milestone in the legacy SD-video digitization market.

In the past years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly developed and used for various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. As an example, LLMs can be employed for content classification without a need for manual human annotation or exhaustive training datasets. However, such LLMs are associated with high computational cost during inference, preventing their wide adoption in the audiovisual industry, such as large scale audiovisual collections.

In this context, we want to automatically classify broadcast news into topics. Topic classification can be useful for audiovisual content retrieval or monitoring, but remains a challenging problem, particularly due to the difficult task of segmenting continuous feed into homogenous extracts. To solve this issue, we propose a framework applied on French TV and radio news where we transcribe a dataset of 11.7k hours, broadcasted in 2023 on 21 channels with a State-of-the-Art transcription model. A LLM is used in few-shot conversation mode to obtain a topic classification on those transcriptions. We define a topic classification scheme based on the IPTC categories.

Using the generated LLM annotations, we explore the finetuning of a specialized smaller classification model. To evaluate the performances of these models, and to estimate the subjectivity of the topic categorization task, we construct and annotate a test set of 03h44m. We demonstrate that while LLM's inference costs makes them prohibitive for large scale analysis of audiovisual collections, they can be used to generate synthetic datasets used to train less complex models (students) associated to much smaller inference time and better classification performances.

Finally, using an automatic gender classification tool, we compute the speaking time per gender depending on the topic, to determine if some subjects are predominantly reserved to specific genders. We show that women are notably under-represented in subjects such as sports and politics.

The transformative potential of applying artificial intelligence in the context of audiovisual archiving has been demonstrated across a spectrum of use cases related to search & exploration, preservation, artistic expression and big-data analysis. This presentation explores research findings regarding the integration of AI solutions specifically in humanities and social sciences research.  

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimedia Models (LMMs) poses new opportunities and questions in this area. For instance, LLMs could support the content annotation tasks for researchers working on framing analysis over large amounts of textual data. But more investigation is required to determine how such systems could be fine tuned and integrated into research workflows to deliver satisfactory and trustworthy outcomes. The goal of this research was to develop a roadmap that guides the development and use of LLMs and LMMs in SSH research. It (i) Identifies potential SSH research areas (such as framing analysis) that could benefit from the use of LMMs / LLMs, (ii) Identify limitations and risks of these techniques, (iii) provide recommendations on how LLMs and LMMs could be designed and fine tuned to fit SSH scholar needs.

We will also reflect on how researchers, archives, and the broader cultural sector can contribute to promoting more responsible AI practices in society and raising "AI Literacy." This entails exploring practical ways in which cultural institutions can actively engage with the ethical and societal implications of AI, such as curating exhibitions that examine AI's impact on human lives, hosting workshops to educate the public about AI technologies and their implications, and collaborating with researchers to develop resources that foster critical thinking about AI in diverse communities.

The Preservation and Migration Commission has proposed in June a Seminar on the topic of authenticity, as media archives are expected to ensure quality and trust.

We propose here a summarisation, further thoughts, and some prelimanary conclusions.