FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2026

Early 20th-century archaeological expeditions produced a rich body of visual material: film footage, field photographs, lantern slides documenting landscapes, excavation methods and cultural contexts. Dispersed across museums, university libraries and national film archives, these film collections remain difficult to discover, cross-reference or integrate into contemporary research. This presentation reports on an ongoing project that applies AI techniques to support descriptive cataloguing and access in digitized early film archives.
The project centers on a corpus of records from institutions in Europe and North America. Using vision language models, it explores how AI-assisted workflows help integrate contextual metadata, including site, estimated date ranges, artefact types. The presentation goes through opportunities and challenges of existing models trained on modern visual conventions that differ from historical image quality, aesthetic and stylistic composition. It observes how black-and-white historical footage with inconsistent framing and labels requires domain-specific approaches, and which solutions can be envisaged to preserve the richness of early audiovisual information.
Beyond cataloguing, the presentation examines how automated archival description affects and transforms cultural memory. Text matches and visual similarity now allow researchers to reconstruct early film sequences across archives and curate thematic collections that reframe and reposition our understanding of historical events. The paper reflects critically on the digitization of early footage and its entanglements with automation: which screen memories can machines unlock?
By sharing epistemological reflections on early documentary film culture, this presentation aims to contribute to broader conversations in the FIAT/IFTA community about the responsible integration of AI into archival workflows and the renewed relevance of historical film collections as forms of cultural mediation.

Between 1976 and 1980, the Radio and Television Department (SRTV) of the now-defunct Embrafilme - the state-owned company active in film production and distribution between 1969 and 1990 - produced, with the aim of promoting local cinema, two weekly programs, Cinemateca and Coisas Nossas, broadcast on TV Educativa in Rio de Janeiro, as well as medium-length documentaries designed for television. Cinemateca featured reports on the vibrant film activity in the country, especially in Rio de Janeiro, bringing together testimonies from filmmakers, actors, researchers, technicians, and audiences, along with behind-the-scenes footage and festival coverage. Coisas Nossas, in turn, was dedicated to the full screening of short films, accompanied by presentations and discussions.
The collection preserved by the Centro Técnico Audiovisual (CTAv) consists of 63 complete programs on U-matic tapes, as originally broadcast on television, in addition to film materials and audio tapes, including approximately 620 raw and leftover materials, mostly original 16mm reversal film stock with magnetic sound. The collection, which includes more than 3500 items, is currently being organized and cataloged by the CTAv team in partnership with the Audiovisual Historiography Research Group at Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora (UFJF). The project has also resulted in the production of a documentary, currently in the editing phase.
CTAv began the process of digitizing the film materials in 2011. The content, gradually made available for free on CTAv’s social media platforms, has been used by researchers as well as documentary filmmakers, re-signifying and critically reexamining images created decades ago, when the relationship between the State and cinema in Brazil was radically different from that of the 21st century.

NHK preserves more than 10 million items of program and news footage, and many older materials lack sufficient metadata due to past production practices. Missing metadata makes it difficult to locate footage, verify rights, and identify elements that may be perceived as problematic today. This is a challenge faced by archives worldwide. NHK’s primary solution to this issue is the MCG (Multi-use Contents Group) Reuse Advisors, a specialized team that ensures safe and responsible reuse of archival footage.
The MCG Reuse Advisors conduct detailed reuse risk management, including rights investigation, tracing original production staff when records are incomplete, and reviewing whether footage may cause misunderstanding or discomfort from a contemporary perspective. When the original material is unsuitable, they recommend safer alternatives. In 2025, the team handled more than 1,500 inquiries, demonstrating its essential role in supporting production teams and maintaining responsible editorial practice.
In addition to this core workflow, NHK has recently introduced AI Metadata-less Search, a tool that allows users to retrieve visually relevant shots by typing simple words such as “cat,” “grilling meat,” or “airplane.” While this AI system is not the main focus of our proposal, it increasingly supports the MCG and producers by improving discoverability—especially for metadata-poor footage—and helping teams find potential alternatives more efficiently.
Although the MCG Reuse Advisors remain the central decision-makers, the combination of expert human judgment and new technical tools contributes to a more reliable and efficient reuse process. This presentation will focus on NHK’s MCG framework, share case examples, and briefly introduce how emerging tools like AI search can complement, but not replace, expert evaluation. Together, these efforts illustrate a practical model for responsible reuse in diverse archival environments. 

In recent years, Brazil has witnessed a growing interest in sports films and documentaries based on archival footage, with productions such as 1995: No Tempo dos Bad Boys, Doutor Castor, A Mão do Eurico, Senna, Brasil 2002 and Brasil 70: A Saga do Tri. These works demonstrate not only the cultural appeal of sports memory, but also the central role played by audiovisual archives in shaping public narratives about national history, identity and collective imagination.

This proposal aims to present examples from the sports audiovisual collection of Fundação Padre Anchieta/TV Cultura, highlighting its relevance as a research and footage-licensing center for archival sports documentaries. As one of the pioneering institutions in Brazilian television broadcasting and sports roundtable programming, TV Cultura holds a rich and diverse collection, including materials produced by the broadcaster itself as well as records originating from other television channels and institutions.

The project also addresses a crucial challenge in audiovisual preservation: the safeguarding, restoration and digitization of materials whose copyrights belong to other entities, but which may no longer be preserved, accessible or even extant in the collections of their original rights holders. This is particularly relevant in the case of footage from broadcasters such as TV Manchete and TV Tupi, as well as institutions affected by major archival losses, including fires. By discussing access, reuse and responsibility, this proposal argues that the preservation of sports audiovisual archives is essential not only for institutional memory, but also for the circulation, reinterpretation and survival of Brazilian sports memory.

Since 2023, a team of researchers, technicians, and fellows has been developing a project titled “Audiovisual, History and Preservation: The Place of Brazilian Newsreels and Television Reports in the Construction of Memory (1946–1974)”, coordinated by Eduardo Victorio Morettin (ECA-USP) and funded by FAPESP (grant no. 2022/06032-0).
The project examines, in the context of Brazil’s democratic period and the civil-military dictatorship, representations of historical events and social groups, as well as the cultural and political imaginaries and discourses conveyed in television reports broadcast by TV Tupi - the country’s first television network (1950 - 1980), whose archive was incorporated into the Brazilian Cinematheque in 1987.
This presentation focuses on processes of audiovisual cataloguing, preservation, and expanded access to these materials, highlighting their transdisciplinary nature. The TV Tupi Collection comprises approximately 180,000 16mm reels (around 8,800 cases), in addition to a substantial set of scripts for national and international news narration. It is estimated that about 150,000 of these materials date from the 1950s to 1974, forming the core corpus of the project.
This work emphasizes the articulation between historical research, critical analysis, and laboratory practices in audiovisual preservation. By engaging with a largely unseen and still underexplored corpus, the project contributes to the recognition and circulation of a significant portion of Brazil’s audiovisual memory, expanding possibilities for research on the country’s history, politics, and culture.

Founded in 1971, the Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken preserves one of Argentina's most significant audiovisual collections. Its holdings include over 90,000 film reels, from early nitrate film to contemporary productions, among them major collections such as the Sucesos Argentinos newsreel archive and the Canal 9 television news collection; more than 50,000 photographs; and thousands of posters, sketches, costumes, scripts, production documents, and cinematographic equipment. Hundreds of thousands of items across a wide range of formats and typologies.


For more than five decades, the museum's staff have documented the collection through paper-based inventories and, later, dozens of carefully maintained spreadsheets. Over the same period, successive municipal and international initiatives introduced centralized cataloging platforms, from city-wide databases to UNESCO-backed systems like WinISIS, but each was either discontinued or left without ongoing support. The museum's own records outlived them all, yet no single system ever tied the information together.


This presentation traces how the museum reconciled and migrated decades of accumulated data into an integrated open-source collection management system and public digital catalog, bridging independently managed film, photographic, archival, and object collections in a single platform. It includes a live demonstration of the result.


Drawing on this experience, we discuss what it takes to build sustainable digital collections infrastructure in contexts where continuity cannot be taken for granted. We share what we learned about legacy data reconciliation, open-source adoption, and the concrete role of international cooperation.