FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2026

The FIAT/IFTA Value Use and Copyright Commission has since the last world conference in Rome 2025 worked on a project about ethical considerations in broadcasting archives. The project was initiated at the conference by a round table discussion with some of the following subjects: 
* Opening Databases to the Public
* Re-Publishing Biased or Offensive Archival Content
* Preservation of Metadata and Historical Integrity
* Need for Institutional Guidelines

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. 

This presentation will reflect on the full trajectory from data preparation to public launch, culminating in the go-live of the Treasury Chamber mid 2026. We will share initial user responses and usage patterns, examining whether they aligned with expectations formed during development or revealed unforeseen behaviors and needs. In doing so, we aim to provide insight into how large-scale data transformation, ethical decision-making, and real-world user engagement intersect in the creation of a cultural heritage platform.
2 years ago in Bucharest, Sound & Vision presented its preparations for the mass-scale publication of audiovisual collections, supported in part by the EU Copyright Directive and its provisions for making out-of-commerce works accessible online. At that stage, the focus lay primarily on large-scale data processing: analyzing metadata quality, streamlining rights information, and implementing workflows to support sustainable data management and clearance activities.
In the past years, this preparatory work evolved into a series of concrete decisions about how data should be transformed, enriched, and ultimately presented to end users. This included choices about metadata normalization, contextual enrichment, and the balance between completeness and usability in the user interface. Particular attention was paid to how archival data—often complex, inconsistent, or incomplete—could be made accessible and meaningful without oversimplifying its context.
Alongside these technical and design considerations, ethical questions played a role. Decisions had to be made about what material could and should be published online, how to handle sensitive or potentially problematic content, and how to responsibly represent historical records in a public-facing environment. These considerations influenced not only rights clearance workflows but also data presentation strategies and access conditions within the platform.
To support collaboration between Sound & Vision and its external development partner, user archetypes were used to align discussions around user needs and expectations. However, also a very driver of development remained the data itself: its structure, limitations, and potential for reuse.

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.

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.

This presentation proposes a case study of data.ina.fr, a public platform developed by INA to unlock the potential of audiovisual archives by transforming them into long-term, interpretable data about media coverage in France. Rather than focusing on individual archive items or editorial reuse, data.ina.fr introduces a new paradigm: archives as a source of structured evidence that allows society to observe, compare, and understand media narratives over time. 
The platform analyses nearly two million hours of television and radio broadcasts from twenty French channels over a ten-year period (2015–2026). Through a set of interactive visualisations, it enables users to explore how current affairs are treated by media : which personalities dominate media attention, how territories are represented, how language evolves, and how gender balance in airtime varies across channels and years. This long-term, quantitative perspective put the spotlight on trends that are impossible to grasp through manual consultation of archives alone. 
data.ina.fr is grounded in two founding principles. First, to give meaning to archival collections beyond the archive object itself, by extracting indicators that allow comparison, verification, and contextualisation. Second, to create a tool for the objectivation of information over time, capable of supporting journalism, research, education, and public debate. In this sense, the project positions archives not only as heritage, but as a living public resource. 
This approach has made data.ina.fr a reference tool for professionals. Journalists from major national media regularly use the platform to support investigations, contextualise breaking news, and produce data-driven storytelling grounded in archival evidence. It is also integrated into journalism education, where it serves as a practical resource for teaching investigative methods based on quantitative analysis of media content. Beyond journalism, researchers in linguistics, political science, marketing, and public policy use the platform to analyse media representations and agenda-setting dynamics. 
Internally, data.ina.fr has transformed INA’s own editorial practices. Journalists rely on it to investigate issues such as gender-based violence, foreign interference campaigns, disinformation strategies, or media concentration. Monthly publications such as the data.ina.fr News Barometer provide recurring indicators on parity, territorial coverage, and dominant narratives, reinforcing INA’s role as a trusted public media actor capable of objectifying the media treatment of current affairs. 

Audiovisual materials are experienced through screens and speakers and in the 21st century these can be found in every home, class room and pocket, providing an opportunity to massively expand access to the audiovisual collections. For the past three years, the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) has been renewing its approach to collection sharing and contextualisation across key external channels including YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. In March 2026, NFSA released an entirely new website designed as an online audiovisual museum. It provides access to 5,500 items from the collection, with more to be added regularly, along with curatorial notes and longer form journalism exploring the stories behind the clips. Designed to be appealing to the broadest possible audiences, the website is a resource of Australian history, of the diversity and impact of audiovisual forms, and offers a fun way to relive pop culture memories. 


NFSA is Australia's national audiovisual collection. Collecting began in 1935 making it one of the longest established public collections in the world. Over the decades, collecting strategies have changed and adapted in response to technological and cultural shifts. Today, the collection includes almost 700,000 individual works that span all formats from celluloid to interactive digital, and from factual and news recordings to games, music, broadcast, sports, social media and advertising. With such a broad scope, the collection offers potential to all Australians for inspiration, learning, research and enjoyment.


This paper will show how NFSA developed its multi-channel content distribution strategy, from staffing structures to market research driven insights, rights management, audience development and platform build, and will provide a snapshot of user responses six months from the launch of the website.

In contemporary broadcast television, audiovisual archives have moved well beyond preservation and historical reference. When placed in the hands of editors and curators working within promotional content, they become powerful narrative tools capable of connecting audiences across generations through emotion, memory and cultural identity. This presentation offers a practice-based perspective on how archival footage can be reinterpreted through montage editing to create new narratives that resonate with contemporary audiences.


Drawing from case studies developed at TV Globo, Brazil's largest broadcast network, the presentation examines promotional campaigns that combined archival footage from multiple decades to generate emotional continuity between past and present. These include national campaigns such as the FIFA World Cup, the Olympic Games, Formula 1, the 70th anniversary of Brazilian telenovelas, and the 50th anniversary of Roberto Carlos' iconic year-end television special. Each of these events carries a strong intergenerational dimension, having been experienced by different audiences over time.


A central element of this process is the curatorial work that begins before the edit: navigating broadcast archives in search of emblematic gestures, movements and emotionally charged moments with the potential to resonate across time. Once identified, these fragments are joined through match cut montage, transforming disconnected historical scenes into a single, continuous flow in which past and present coexist.
The presentation argues that montage editing functions as a form of cultural mediation that activates archival memory and reinforces broadcast television as a living repository of collective experiences. Rooted in a Brazilian context, it contributes to broader global discussions in the field, showing how the creative reuse of archival footage can introduce younger generations to cultural moments they never witnessed firsthand and transforming the broadcast archive into a gateway for intergenerational discovery.

A significant portion of the collection managed by Empresa Brasil de Comunicação (EBC), a federal public broadcasting company, was produced before the company was established. The state-owned company was created by Law No. 11,652 of April 7, 2008, and all assets previously managed by the Roquette Pinto Educational Communication Association (Acerp) and Radiobrás were transferred to EBC. Although the transfer of assets was provided for by law, this was not sufficient to avoid questions regarding the ownership of this collection. In addition to the legal aspects, the lack of existing documentation on the audiovisual and radio works created challenges for management, particularly regarding licensing, access, and distribution.
The growing interest among audiovisual professionals, teachers, researchers, and students in the content produced over the course of 100 years of Brazilian public broadcasting history calls for solutions to existing challenges and strategic decision-making to enable access to and dissemination of this collection.
Accordingly, the purpose of this presentation is to share the experience of the Archive and Research Management Department (GARPE)—which oversees EBC’s collection—in addressing these challenges and the measures being taken to find solutions that ensure broader access, dissemination, and licensing, not only for students and professionals in the audiovisual industry but for society as a whole.

This presentation discusses the activation of audiovisual archives through pedagogical and creative practices developed in the Audiovisual Production Workshops at FGV CPDOC (Brazil), which completed ten years in 2024. The workshops are based on one of the largest collections of personal archives in Latin America and promote the production of short films using archival materials as both source and medium.
Since 2023, the workshops have been part of the project “New Perspectives on the Archive: Visuality, Circulation and Education in Women’s Archives” (FAPERJ/CNPq), focusing on women’s histories and the critical re-reading of archival collections. Through a practice-led approach, participants engage with archival documents not only as historical evidence but as material for reinterpretation, montage, and narrative construction.
The presentation examines selected films produced within this framework to explore how archival images are reactivated through editing processes that negotiate between institutional constraints, creative agency, and pedagogical goals. Particular attention is given to the tensions between technical, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions of archival reuse, including issues of visibility, silencing, metadata limitations, and representational bias.
By situating the classroom and the editing room as spaces of research, the paper argues that audiovisual practices can transform the archive from a site of preservation into a dynamic field of interpretation and circulation. In this context, montage becomes a critical operation that not only re-signifies images but also challenges dominant narratives, especially in relation to gender and the historical marginalization of women in archival systems.
The case study highlights how collaborative filmmaking processes can expand archival access, generate new forms of public engagement, and reposition audiovisual archives as active agents in the production of knowledge.

The rapid obsolescence of analog media and playback equipment represents a critical risk to the preservation of audiovisual archives. This paper presents a large-scale digitization project of Betacam tapes, starting with an initial scope of 50,000 media items, developed as a strategy to mitigate this risk and enhance the value of the collection.
To meet these demands, the FlyPack solution (by company Meta Martis) was adopted, enabling greater efficiency in the digitization workflow, optimized resource usage, and quality control within a high-volume environment. The proposal addresses the technical and operational challenges involved in the mass conversion of analog content to digital formats.
As a result, the project is expected to enrich the archive and expand opportunities for access, use, and reuse of the content. Digitization also paves the way for the application of artificial intelligence, enabling new forms of analysis, organization, and value creation, while fostering future opportunities within the audiovisual ecosystem.

PAVIC – Audiovisual, Iconography, and Content Researchers is a Nationwide, a nonprofit professional association in Brazil. We were established to raise awareness of and give proper recognition to the research professionals working in cultural, artistic, educational, and entertainment markets.

Founded in January 2022, PAVIC brings together 196 research professionals. As an association, one of our key missions is to promote and strengthen this professional field, as well as to drive improvement and efficiency in the production processes within the audiovisual and cultural sectors, which directly enhances the quality of the final products.

In the audiovisual field, research professionals preserve the memory of the entire production process for films, series, and soap operas. This includes details about the raw materials—such as images, sounds, or characters, which is especially vital when dealing with archival materials.

In ongoing collaboration with audiovisual archive institutions, researchers actively engage in processes of reuse, reinterpretation, and cultural mediation of media collections, helping to preserve and celebrate this important memory.