FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2026

TVN holds one of the most significant archives in Latin America, preserving the social, political, and cultural heritage of our country through audiovisual records of incalculable value. This archive represents an emblematic case of the destruction of a large part of its collection following the Military Coup in Chile on September 11, 1973. Over the years, it has been recovered and is recognized today for the preserved content that has largely allowed us to reclaim our history as a society and a nation during those years.


Television material (news and programs) kept in the TVN Audiovisual Archive and produced during the Popular Unity government (Salvador Allende) was ordered to be eliminated—including the footage of Pablo Neruda receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. However, with a sense of historical protection, these materials were hidden for years until Chile returned to democracy. Their preservation was a risky method during years dominated by institutional violence and uncertainty. Today, we can feel proud and fulfilled in our duty as "guardians of history and memory," because this content has been a fundamental pillar for countless historical recovery programs. These programs have allowed us to recognize ourselves as Chileans, to know who we were and what our society was like before the Military Dictatorship—how cities, inhabitants, urban tribes, and music have changed.


During difficult times, one way to protect the archive content marked for elimination was to remove the cards from the manual catalog that detailed the material. We created minimal descriptions of images documenting protests against Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial regime in the 1980s. The cataloging systems for this new material were insufficient, or their context had been lost. It was a slow and costly task, making it difficult to reconstruct the moments they were recorded. We had to conduct extensive research to re-catalog this material, searching through newspapers and frequently consulting the memory of journalists for accurate descriptions. It was only then—at a time when it was finally possible to speak of human rights, political violence, or detained-disappeared persons—that we truly grasped the importance of having preserved those images. This process was necessary to establish how events unfolded in accordance with history.
The digitization process of this Archive began in 2010 with a planned ingestion project tailored to our needs and our commitment to the social role of the archive, which is part of the Audiovisual Heritage of TVN, Chile's public television.
It is important to highlight the work of librarians and journalists in re-cataloging content from those dictatorial times, when language was tightly controlled, and beginning to use a new language that accurately described what the images showed regarding Human Rights, violence, repression, and detained-disappeared persons.
With the help of digitization, we have set the fundamental task of increasing data collection to improve user-centered planning for this archive. We continue to move forward with the ingestion of historical content, solving daily the challenges posed by such old materials and formats that are increasingly difficult to rescue, but which contain valuable content reflecting the lives of Chileans during a specific era.


The commitment the Archive assumes toward history and the collective memory of a country is remarkable: without archives, there is no memory, and when we speak of memory, we are speaking of preservation.


Our mission as the Archive of Chilean Public Television is to preserve the audiovisual heritage that belongs to all Chileans. It is within this mission that we have focused our work to fulfill the challenge and dream of making the content archived and preserved for over 55 years available to all of Chilean society.


Finally, I believe that a great "vision for the future" will mark our path as archivists, allowing us to fulfill our mission of preserving images as a reflection of our society's history, ensuring that through them, memory can reconstruct the life lived.