FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2024

Details on how to attend TBA.

Archival gaps and silences are often examined from the perspective of the content of a collection or the community it serves. Little work has been done on how these archival gaps and silences are felt within the profession itself. The disabled community has particularly felt this lack of professional self-reflection. Disabled archivist representation is quite low according to the little data that has been collected.

This workshop looks to work with conference participants on how to make their archival institutions a more accessible space for disabled archivists in the present and future. Michael shares his own experiences as a trained film archivist with epilepsy alongside his findings on accessibility gaps in moving image archival education.

Themes include programming, metadata, cataloguing, physical and digital accessible archival spaces, training, and equitable hiring practises. Each theme is introduced and contextualized within its current relationship to accessibility relating to pertinent concepts. Concepts outlined include, but are not limited to, trauma-informed archival practise, the person-centered archive, the care-centered archive, and universal design. Not only will these concepts be defined but will be used for strategic action items that institutions can take to make their own archive more accessible.

Michael will address questions, discuss strategies for inclusion, while also opening the floor to conference participants. The interactive nature of this workshop gives attendees the opportunity to share their own accessibility strategies, successes, and opportunities for improvement. A global conference allows for varying perspectives from countries that have different legislation relating to accessibility and the working environment. Collaboration is necessary to create a truly inclusive archival spaces for everyone.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In 1980, B.B. King gave his second concert at the Montreux Jazz Festival. The recording was made by Swiss sound engineer Philippe Zumbrunn on CJ 87 Pyral tape in NAGRA Master analogue audio. Unfortunately, the polymer base sticks to the adjacent magnetic coating, making it unplayable. When read, the tape sheds and clogs the player.  UNESCO’s Magnetic Tape Alert Project found that degradation problems are common to millions of historic tapes. The Australian National Film and Sound Archive even stated ‘Tape that is not digitised by 2025 will in most cases be lost forever’. But is it so?

The “Play it Again” project at the Paul Scherrer Institute (Switzerland) uses chemical and physical characterisation to better understand magnetic tape degradation in a collaboration with the Montreux Jazz Digital Project. For Pyral tape, infrared spectra are consistent with other tapes suffering from ‘sticky-shed’. As it is not the magnetic binder that is at fault, but rather the polymer base, this suggests a need for a more careful classification of tape degradation pathways to aid conservation. Physical characterisation using electron microscopy shows micrometre-scale cracks across the tape. Heat treatment does not heal the cracks, meaning that this degradation is irreversible and the magnetic signal will become intrinsically noisier with time. Similarly, in collaboration with the British Film Institute, we are investigating degradation in video tapes. Some of our research questions include: Are physical treatments helping the tapes, or just mitigating the decay symptoms long enough to allow for digitisation? Is attempting to treat tapes doing more harm than good?

So, is 2025 a final deadline? Probably not, however degradation is generally irreversible, eventually rendering magnetic tapes totally unplayable using conventional technologies. We are presently developing a contactless solution using synchrotron X-rays for recovering the recorded information from such degraded tapes.

VRT has 120.000 files (60.000 hours in total), which possibly contain colour flickering. The defect was introduced during bulk digitisation starting in 2015, of Betacam SP and SX to MXF-DV25 from 1980 and 2005. During the project insufficient digitisation quality control was in place.

In order to avoid having to re-digitise 120.000 tapes, VRT was looking for a partner to investigate if a digital detection and correction could be possible. Joanneum Research and HS-Art partnered up to take on this challenge. A solution for the digital detection and restoration of colour flickering has been implemented. For the detection the properties of the colour flickering have been carefully researched and a solution has been developed which covers a wide range of relevant properties, as there are varying degrees of flicker magnitude and varying size of the colour flickering areas. Based on the flicker magnitude and area it is decided which media items and media sections get restored digitally. During restoration the colour information of each affected frame is seamlessly reconstructed from the colour of the neighbouring frames. The presentation will introduce the preservation use case, the solutions workflow, operational experiences and various samples for the detection and restoration of colour flicker.

For this tape digitisation artefact the digital detection and restoration is an ideal solution, as the defect can be detected reliably and restored in high quality, and this in a much more cost efficient way as re-digitisation would have been. In order to avoid the need for re-digitisation or digital restoration its recommended to include appropriate quality control procedures in each current video and film digitisation project right from the beginning.

The cultural and historical value of videogames can no longer be ignored. Yet, as an interactive medium, video games still continue to provide a challenge in archives and as a historical basis. At the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision we've incorporated a strategy to preserve games in interactive form by leveraging emulation, working together with the rights holders of these games and presenting them to the public in interactive methods to broaden the understanding and highlight this aspect of our archive.

In this session we put all our cards (and controllers) on the table and explain our methodology, how working with the game's creators themselves allows us to bring a new perspective on video game preservation and how to present games as cultural heritage to the general public. Preserving interactive media and software through emulation, may even be applied in fields other than video games, making them valuable tools even if your institution has yet to take the plunge on games-preservation.

Approximately 450,000 hours of broadcast program material on video cassettes have been recorded over the years by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation as part of legal deposit recordings. In order to protect these unique broadcasting assets in the long-term, these video cassettes need to be transferred into archive files to be preserved in the National Library of Norway's digital long-term archive.

For this high-volume migration a specialized quality-controlled QUADRIGA Video digitization system from Cube-Tec International has been installed. An additional QC workflow was customized according to the user’s specifications. The entire ingest system is using 16 broadcast video tape recorders. The installation is now completely in productive use, so that one operator transfers about 128 hours of video in one work shift per day in a fully quality-controlled operation.

For the DVCAM cassette collection a special direct readout feature is used. This provides users with real-time monitoring and archiving of the compressed digital video streams straight from DVCAM video cassettes. Working directly from the original format not only improves error detection levels, but the implementation of proprietary algorithms also enables users to apply error correction years, or even decades, after the migration has happened.

The presentation will be given jointly by Stian Rishaug (National Library Norway) who will explain how the installation was realised and the operation is driven, and Tom Lorenz (Cube-Tec International) who will describe how the technical solution was adapted to special requirements at National Library Norway.

The presentation proposes reflection on the choice made by Group Globo of Communications of hiring Google Cloud.

The decision of contracting Cloud companies was taken by Globo in alignment with the world’s tendency in detecting in cloud computing an opportunity to reduce expenses and be more effective. Its audiovisual documents’ back up are now stored in the Cloud. There was a project developed at Globo’s Archives to send to Google Cloud all previous documents up until the contract with Google, whether those were born digital or were digitized.

The numbers of this project are presented and studied and lead to a brief check of pros and cons of the usage of cloud services. This brief talk should contemplate the migration to the Cloud and its process, which includes, for example, the interoperability with systems such as Diva and Vizrt.

Other services provided by the Cloud are taken under consideration, such as usage of artificial intelligence to input basic metadata on documents and face recognition algorithm.

The approach to the matter has its foundation in basically two columns: literary references, and the analysis of interviews conducted with collaborators of Globo, each of them connected to the process of cloudification, but through different perspectives.

The paper titled "Archive Iraq: Films are rising again. How, when and who?" by Wareth Kwaish, a Project Officer of the Iraqi Archive Project, discusses the efforts to preserve Iraq's cinematic heritage. It highlights the historical richness of Iraqi visual memory, emphasizing the importance of films as cultural, historical, and social treasures.

The paper outlines the establishment of the Committee for the Iraqi Visual Memory, supported by the French Embassy and Expertise France, to restore and digitize over 100 Iraqi films. The project involves training Iraqi professionals in film assessment, inventory, restoration, and digitization techniques.

Objectives include creating a digital film library accessible for education and research, raising societal awareness on film preservation, and preserving Iraq's cultural legacy. The methodology encompasses film selection, evaluation, restoration, and digitization, coupled with community engagement. The project aims to ensure the continuity of Iraqi visual memory, contributing to the larger Iraq Archive Project, preserving the nation's heritage for future generations and global appreciation.

Migration is a key preservation action for digital collections. It is unavoidable; challenges like planned hardware obsolescence, format obsolescence, and the staggering storage needs of digital data are some of the issues that pose risks to the long-term accessibility of born-digital materials. It is not a walk in the park. Successful migration requires significant technical expertise, support, and planning. Irrecoverable data loss can easily occur if it is not performed well. For a process that is so unforgiving, it is naturally a daunting task for many, particularly for those embarking on it for the first time. Using several case studies, this presentation seeks to consolidate lessons, identify considerations, and provide guidance to those embarking on the great migration.

It is by now widely acknowledged among scholars that television as a medium played a pivotal role in the unfolding of the Romanian Revolution of 1989. This assertion is commonly understood to highlight the significance of the Romanian Revolution as a historical event that was broadcast in real-time, thus marking the inauguration of a new era in the history of media. It also implies the gradual change of status of the Romanian Television as an institution during those days, from catalyst of popular discontent to agent of large-scale manipulation.

This paper will thus be developed around two axis. The first one will posit that the symbolic supremacy of the Revolution among neighbouring countries and its endurance over time predominantly rely on the creation of the creation of what Cahiers du cinéma film critics Serge Daney and Serge Toubiana referred to as “trademark images” – convenient clichés which “prevent any other image from being seen” (no. 268-269), while helping to create an easily recognisable, sellable image of the event. By examining theoretical frameworks proposed by Traverso or Siani-Davies, this first axis will uncover those sequences that conform to a sensationalist revolutionary imagery.

The second axis will provide a corrective to this reading. It will highlight precisely those images which do not conform to preconceived schemes. It will aim to show both the occurrences in which the newly liberated television attempted to incorporate the democratic regime into its audiovisual treatment (a more egalitarian distribution of speeches, panoramic movements showing the personnel behind cameras, etc.) and those that depict the revolution as a site of hesitancy, confusion, and mistakes – in short, as an authentic bearer of contradictory possibilities for the future. The complexity of the event will emerge according to the capabilities of live broadcasting within a nascent free television, providing a valuable lesson of reportage for generations to come.