Digital Archiving Practices in Audiovisual Archives: An Exploration of the Use of Media Asset Management Systems in Television Broadcasting Organizations

<p>Research Problem: Over the last decade television audiovisual archives have undergone major changes in response to the introduction of digital media and digital production systems, particularly in relation to television news. While there is significant research into how the use of digital technology affects other user groups within the television broadcasting sector, such as journalists, there is very little that focuses on the work of audiovisual archivists. Methodology: Semi-structured interviews were used to explore the experiences of television audiovisual archivists who have been involved with the implementation and use of digital media management systems. Questions focused on three main areas: selection and appraisal, cataloguing, and search and retrieval. Results: Interview data provided detailed descriptions of the processes and actions that audiovisual archivists employ in the course of their daily work. Qualitative analysis of the data is used to identify the problems that audiovisual archivists experience and the methods they use to address these problems. It also provides insight into the ways archivists incorporate media management tasks into their routines. Implications: Television archives are very much still in a transition phase which is characterized by the use of multiple systems that enable access to both analogue and digital content. One area that remains problematic for some archivists is the lack of ability to incorporate quality and authority control into descriptive metadata that is created using digital media management systems. Archivists are taking on more media management responsibilities and working closer with production staff in a number of ways.</p>

Digital Archiving Practices in Audiovisual Archives: An Exploration of the Use of Media Asset Management Systems in Television Broadcasting Organizations

<p>Research Problem: Over the last decade television audiovisual archives have undergone major changes in response to the introduction of digital media and digital production systems, particularly in relation to television news. While there is significant research into how the use of digital technology affects other user groups within the television broadcasting sector, such as journalists, there is very little that focuses on the work of audiovisual archivists. Methodology: Semi-structured interviews were used to explore the experiences of television audiovisual archivists who have been involved with the implementation and use of digital media management systems. Questions focused on three main areas: selection and appraisal, cataloguing, and search and retrieval. Results: Interview data provided detailed descriptions of the processes and actions that audiovisual archivists employ in the course of their daily work. Qualitative analysis of the data is used to identify the problems that audiovisual archivists experience and the methods they use to address these problems. It also provides insight into the ways archivists incorporate media management tasks into their routines. Implications: Television archives are very much still in a transition phase which is characterized by the use of multiple systems that enable access to both analogue and digital content. One area that remains problematic for some archivists is the lack of ability to incorporate quality and authority control into descriptive metadata that is created using digital media management systems. Archivists are taking on more media management responsibilities and working closer with production staff in a number of ways.</p>

Research and Development of Blockchain Recordkeeping at the National Archives of Korea

In 2019, the National Archives of Korea (NAK) developed a blockchain recordkeeping platform to conduct R&D on recordkeeping approaches. This paper introduces two types of R&D studies that have been conducted thus far. The first is the use of blockchain transaction audit trail technology to ensure the authenticity of audiovisual archives, i.e., the application of blockchain to a new system. The second uses blockchain technology to verify whether the datasets of numerous information systems built by government agencies are managed without forgery or tampering, i.e., the application of blockchain to an existing system. Government work environments globally are rapidly shifting from paper records to digital. However, the traditional recordkeeping methodology has not adequately kept up with these digital changes. Despite the importance of responding to digital changes by incorporating innovative technologies such as blockchain in recordkeeping practices, it is not easy for most archives to invest funds in experiments on future technologies. Owing to the Korean government’s policy of investing in digital transformation, NAK’s blockchain recordkeeping platform has been developed, and several R&D tasks are underway. Hopefully, the findings of this study will be shared with archivists around the world who are focusing on the future of recordkeeping.

FROM TESTIMONY TO HETEROGLOSSIA: THE VOICE(S) OF LAMENT IN WE ARE THE PERSIANS!

We are the Persians! was a contemporary adaptation of Aeschy-lus’s The Persians presented in June 2015 at the Athens and Epidaurus Festival. Performed by displaced people from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and directed by Yolanda Markopoulou, the piece grew out of the Station Athens group’s five-year theatre workshops. Extracts from the original play were intertwined with performative material brought to the project by the participants: from real-life testimonies to vocal improvisations, poems, and songs in different languages. High-lighting the historical thematic of the play, this adaptation was presented as a documentary theatre piece, and the participants as ‘modern-day heralds’ who provided on stage ‘shocking accounts’ concerning ‘contem-porary wars’ (programme notes, 2015). After briefly revisiting the main body of literature on the voice of lament in ancient drama and in Aeschylus’s The Persians in particular, but also after discussing the recent stage history of the play in Greece, I conduct a close reading of this adaptation. Based on semi-directed interviews and audiovisual archives from both the rehearsals and the final show,I argue that the participants’ performance cannot be limited to their auto-biographical testimonies, which identify their status as refugees and/or asylum seekers. By intertwining Aeschylus with their own voices and languages, they reappropriate and reinvent the voice(s) of lament in ancient drama. In this sense, I suggest that We are the Persians! can be read as a hybrid performance of heteroglossia, which disrupts and potentially transforms dominant ways of receiving ancient drama on the modern Greek stage.

The degree zero of digital interfaces: a semiotics of audiovisual archives online

Interfaces have partially replaced editors. They now administer and have industrialized the processes of content circulation. Web platforms mediatize cultural memory and one example of this is that of online audiovisual archives which are a paradigmatic case involving interfaces mediating our image of the past. Therefore, their role as an enunciative framework is clearly worthy of thought and study. We will thus use a semiotic approach based on the starting hypothesis that digital interfaces shape our belief systems through a discursive framing of content to which they give access. By analyzing two case studies, we will argue that the transparency of interfaces appears to recall the notion of “mechanical objectivity” and thus refashion the reliability of the archives. However, a final counter-analysis of a document read in the framework of an on-site consultation invites us to reshape our considerations and enlarge the perspective from semiotic visual analysis to include the social processes linked to the publication of digital heritage.

COVID-19 as a Driver for Change in Audiovisual Archives

This report captures the various ways in which the cultural heritage sector is adapting, not only to cope with the uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, but also to flourish in the future. It is the result of a joint virtual exchange between members of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) and the International Federation of Television Archives (FIAT/IFTA). The aim was to gather professionals from the global archival community and to discuss how positive changes could be identified and sustained, to share best practices and individual experiences, and to collaboratively think out the best ways forward.

Audiovisual archives in the era of digital transformation: new forms of presentation and research

The article is a summary of the conclusions made by the author in the monograph, written on the basis of an analysis of the database of data created over 18 years, in which collections of electronic copies of audiovisual archives presented on the network were registered. The article is devoted to identifying the main trends in digitization, presentation online and use electronic copies of audiovisual documents as historical sources.

Historical Reality and Political Aesthetics after Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler

The article aims at showing how far the technologies of audiovisual registration affect not only the ontology of images but also our sense of realism in politics and history. As argue Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, historical events have become “tele-events” after the birth of these technologies. Our handling with images has changed accordingly. As argues Pietro Montani, we no longer consider them as “copies” of real objects but rather as “occasions” for initiating processes of “validation” of history. Hannah Arendt’s opposition between the ancient concept of history being based on praxis and the modern concept of history as “fabrication” (poiesis) of the humankind must be therefore reconsidered. History is rather the negotiation between these two attitudes (praxis and poiesis): cinema might be one of the exemplary sources of this negotiation, as epitomized by the documentary work in the audiovisual archives conducted by Esfir Shub (1927) and Harun Farocki (1992). Representation (Louis Martin) becomes thus a dynamical power of imagination dealing with historical and political reality; consequently, the “ideal spectator”, just as the “ideal reader” for novels (Umberto Eco), is charged with a new task of actualizing the sense of images with regard to their historical and political references.