FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2026

Building Together the Future of The Profession

In response to rapid changes in the audiovisual archive and media profession, he FIAT/IFTA is working on the project of a Think Tank for education in future skills and consolidation of shared knowledge.

As a matter of fact, technological transformation, automation and digital workflows are reshaping roles, skills and professional identities, while some traditional knowledge - especially related to analogue and manual practices - is at risk of being lost.

The Think Tank missions are to:
- Monitor global trends affecting the profession.
- Anticipate skills gaps and emerging needs.
- Act as a strategic observatory for professional evolution in audiovisual archives and related fields.

To carry out these missions, it should actively establish and strengthen alliances and partnerships, and ensure diversity of expertise, professional backgrounds and geographic representation through a dedicated governance.

It will then launch its first activities, at the service of the professional community.

This workshop aims to present and discuss emerging talking points and invite the audience to add to our
story, through participative table discussions:
- What are your biggest challenges in terms of human resources and skills management?
- How do you/would you like to support teams through the current and future changes?
- How do you share knowledge in your archive?
- What do you expect from the FIAT/IFTA in this field, and what can the association offer to help you?

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.

The Museum of Image and Sound of Ceará (MIS CE) was established with the mission of preserving and promoting the state’s audiovisual heritage. Today, its collection is estimated at around 160,000 items, including part of the archive of Educational Television (TVE). Founded in 1974, TVE was created to produce educational content for the Ceará State Secretariat of Culture and Education through a tele-education system.
When the museum was founded in 1980, part of the TVE collection was incorporated into its holdings. This material includes records, 16 mm film reels, and slides. As one of the earliest collections within MIS CE, it was affected over time by relocations and interruptions in preservation processes.
In 2022, the museum was reopened and expanded with a new annex building. This facility includes updated storage areas as well as preservation and digitization laboratories. With new technologies, such as a film scanner, the museum has significantly enhanced its ability to process and share its collections, particularly the TVE archive. A recent assessment helped identify losses that occurred during past relocations and determine how much of the collection still requires digitization.
During the digitization process, numerous materials of historical, cultural, and political significance to the state were identified. This collection reinforces the role of television archives in shaping identity, as it reveals transformations within communities and traces the development of regional social values.
In this context, the history of audiovisual production and television in Ceará - home to the third television station established in the region -, can now be revisited through previously inaccessible sources. It also opens new avenues for research into these materials, contributing to a broader understanding of television history in Brazil.

This communication aims to present the first audiovisual preservation efforts at the State University of Goiás, starting with the creation of the University Laboratory of Audiovisual Memory (LUMINAV), the first in the Brazilian Midwest dedicated to this purpose in a public university. In less than a year of existence, LUMINAV has already managed to digitize and catalog the entire collection of the UEG Cinema and Audiovisual Course (more than 500 short productions in 20 years), in addition to having received more than 1500 items in two collections of inestimable value to 
the culture of Goiás: the Caravídeo collection - containing records of traditional communities, cultural events and social movements active in the state in the early 2000s - and the collection donated by anthropologist Telma Camargo, with accounts from people affected by the Cesium-137 disaster in Goiânia.
This paper also presents the challenges for LUMINAV's permanent and sustainable work in preserving audiovisual memory in Goiás, a territory where public policies for audiovisual media prioritize production and exhibition events, without concern for sound and image heritage accompanying these funding opportunities. Through documentary analysis of the laws that guarantee public funding opportunities for culture in Goiás over the last 10 years (2016-2026), we seek to outline a panorama of public policies for audiovisual media in the state, as well as to point out ways in which audiovisual preservation is considered not through isolated proposals, but as a category eligible for permanent resource allocation.

As Ireland’s national public service media organisation, RTÉ holds a vast, irreplaceable repository of the state’s audiovisual heritage. However, the transition from physical carriers to a resilient digital future presents a challenge. This presentation examines RTÉ’s large-scale migration and digital preservation odyssey - a programme that balances the weight of historical stewardship with the realities of modern fiscal and technological constraints. We analyse the answers to key questions for this programme of projects, such as:

• How did we migrate different archive collections? i.e., how were resourcing challenges tackled and how did we decide on in-house versus outsourced aspects of migration?
• How did we restructure the archive department to accommodate the resourcing of the large-scale projects running in parallel to business as usual?
• How did RTÉ Technology approach this challenge, and what was the modern, resilient, and most cost-effective technology solution deployed to accommodate this mass migration and provide long-term digital access to audiovisual archive content?
• How did we introduce digital preservation principles, and what remains to be done in this area?

Cinemateca da Quebrada is a community-based audiovisual archive created in the outskirts of São Paulo, Brazil, as a response to the historical erasure and misrepresentation of working-class and peripheral communities within official media archives.
The project focuses on collecting, digitising and activating films produced inside these territories, many of which have circulated through informal networks such as pirate DVD stands, independent productions and grassroots audiovisual initiatives. These images, often excluded from institutional preservation, constitute a vital part of contemporary audiovisual memory.
Rather than functioning as a traditional archive, Cinemateca da Quebrada operates as a living and collective platform. Through cineclubs, public screenings and educational actions, the archive is constantly reactivated in dialogue with the communities from which it emerges. In this sense, preservation is inseparable from circulation, and memory is understood as a dynamic and shared process.
The project also engages in transnational collaborations, notably with the Cinemathèque Idéale des Banlieues du Monde, fostering exchanges between peripheral territories in Brazil and France. These dialogues expand the understanding of audiovisual memory beyond national frameworks, highlighting common experiences of inequality, migration and resistance.
This proposal reflects on the challenges of building an archive from the margins: how to preserve without institutional support, how to legitimise informal images, and how to construct memory as a tool for political agency. By sharing this experience, the project contributes to rethinking archival practices in more inclusive, decentralised and community-driven ways.

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.

Television historians inevitably have to contend with gaps when examining the audiovisual archives of broadcasters and preservation institutions, especially when searching for records from the medium’s early decades. However, this is a communication technology — and a domestic device — whose development has enabled audiences themselves to engage in practices of capturing and archiving content, a dynamic that has expanded significantly in the online environment.


Today, many TV fans make use of collective digital video-sharing platforms to upload recordings of old programs, originally captured on VHS tapes or DVDs. Some of these users have become known for this type of activity, at times receiving audiovisual materials from professionals who once worked behind the scenes in television. Not infrequently, clips made available by these fans are also used in contemporary productions focused on the careers of television personalities. Even the disputes between these viewer-archivists and active TV networks — dissatisfied with having recordings of their productions shared by third parties — ultimately attest to the recognition achieved by these fans, who are transformed into “professional-amateurs” as they demonstrate competencies related to the history of television in Brazil.


This paper discusses how the archives of viewer-archivists, as well as fandom practices attentive to past content made available by TV channels on their over-the-top platforms, have contributed to the preservation and narration of Brazilian television memory. Although fan archives are shaped by a curatorial dynamic guided by personal taste and affective investments, they constitute important sources for researchers due to their potential to house records that are no longer present in the broadcasters’ own archives. Moreover, fans dedicated to monitoring the streaming catalogs of TV networks shed light on the very archiving dynamics adopted by media conglomerates over time, revealing continuities, gaps, and reconfigurations in the criteria used for the preservation of television archives.

This paper presents the development of a high-speed video search system based on image features for a large-scale video archive, NHK Archives, without relying on manually created metadata. Conventional video retrieval systems typically require extensive manual metadata annotation. In contrast, the proposed system extracts still images from video clips and computes their features using the CLIP model, enabling multimodal search with text or images to retrieve semantically related scenes.
To achieve practical response times over a massive dataset, the system employs approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search. In addition, a prototype function was developed to automatically generate program structures by combining speech recognition and large language models (LLMs), improving the interpretability of search results by clearly indicating the corresponding programs and scenes.
The system adopts a hybrid architecture in which computationally intensive processes—such as clip extraction, CLIP feature computation, and speech recognition—are executed on-premise, while structure generation and search operations are performed in the cloud. This approach significantly enhances the accessibility of video content while reducing the cost of metadata creation for large-scale video archives.

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.

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. 

The TV Cultura Documentation Centre (1969) brings together an unusual variety of materials for a TV archive. Cedoc is responsible for implementing preservation, cataloguing, digitization, and dissemination actions for the collection under its care.The first challenge of the Cedoc Modernization Project, which began in 2021, was to separate each media and item, with the goal of safeguarding the originals represented by a vast range of materials to be preserved. The collection contains nearly 1 million items, including documents, props and scene mock-ups, objects and models that make up sets and studio scenery, a pinacotheca with sculptures and paintings from different eras created by artists now recognized for TV program scenery, a technological arsenal for telling the history of TV, up to thousands of open-reel videotapes with recordings of radio stations AM and FM, thousands of videotapes from Quadruplex to the last formats, 16mm films, a photographic collection documenting the history of TV, and the making of hundreds of programs, and a library containing publications used as sources by the TV program production teams.The purpose of this presentation is to show how each sector of Cedoc relates with each other and to current TV production, how the archive is transformed into digital media and reused for new TV productions, and what strategies are used for access and licensing, considering the paradigms of audiovisual archives in the digital age. Also, the implementation of the media asset management, especially when data came from all sorts of databases developed internally, at different times, by the Engineering Department, to support audiovisual content search tools archived in the digital repository.

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.

The Archive establishes itself as a living space for creation, innovation, and value generation. In a landscape driven by artificial intelligence, a new form of leadership emerges: the Archive professional who also acts as a content producer, strategic curator, and connector within the media ecosystem.
With the support of AI, knowledge that was once built exclusively through manual descriptions expands. Technologies begin to uncover relationships, contexts, and opportunities hidden within content. This professional understands the Archive as an integral part of the media production process.
All of this happens without losing what is essential: preserving valuable material, caring for raw footage, maintaining organization, and defining what should be kept as heritage and collective memory.
The future of the Archive does not break with its foundations—it amplifies them. And it positions this professional as a bridge between memory, technology, and the creation of new futures.