FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2026

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.