Preservation & Migration Seminar 2026

Presentation of the programme of projects for the large-scale archive content migration, digital preservation, data modelling, and plans for the use of AI in RTÉ Archives.

The BFI National Archive has been recording UK broadcast television off-air for 40 years, and for the last 10 years that recording has been automated, achieving 24/7/365 capture of 18 channels. Within those automated recordings we have recorded every advertisement broadcast across the UK’s commercial services – ITV, Channel Four and Channel 5 – creating a comprehensive document of the nation’s promotional tv content, through a decade of major political and social upheaval such as Brexit and the Covid pandemic.

This important – and very large – collection is undocumented and difficult to access. This presentation will describe parallel projects to change that:

– Using metadata licensed from an advertising industry data provider, to create records for all the adverts, in our Collections Information Database, making this collection fully searchable, with rich descriptive metadata

– Using the timings in that metadata, to generate access to the digital media via our Digital Preservation Infrastructure, enabling visitors to BFI Southbank to discover and view the collection

– Collaborating on a post-doctoral research project with Kings College London’s Computational Humanities group to explore the potential for machine learning and computer vision to augment understanding and documentation of the adverts, driving improvements in access and analysis of this huge dataset

The MY BALKAN(S) project is a collaborative framework designed to strengthen the capacities of public service media institutions in the Western Balkans in the areas of audiovisual cultural heritage preservation, digitisation, and contemporary valorisation. In collaboration with INA France, the project acknowledges the importance of audiovisual archives as shared cultural assets in the Western Balkans region. It also recognises the common challenges these archives face, such as limited digitisation, fragmented institutional infrastructures, restricted accessibility and the need to adapt archival content to contemporary digital environments.

Within this framework, Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) is contributing as a regional partner through two interconnected activity segments.

The first focuses on digitisation, training and knowledge transfer. The RTS Digitisation Centre operates as a shared resource, enabling partner institutions to digitise selected archival materials according to internationally recognised standards and best practices. These activities are conceived as joint learning processes rather than commercial services, thereby reinforcing institutional autonomy and technical sustainability across the region. A series of structured workshops and case studies will document the entire archival workflow, from selection and documentation to restoration and public presentation.

The second segment explores new models of public valorisation, particularly the proposed Balkan Cultural Atlas. This is a digital, borderless platform based on geographical storytelling. Rather than operating as a centralised archive, the Atlas serves as an experimental space for shared visibility, collaborative development and regional dialogue, while fully respecting institutional autonomy.

This presentation will demonstrate how MY BALKAN(S) combines technical development with regional cooperation by strengthening institutions and exploring shared digital tools. It will also show how audiovisual heritage can be used as a foundation for contemporary cultural exchange in the Western Balkans.

RSI Archivi is currently completing the deepest preservation reform in its history, redefining acquisition, conservation and digital preservation within a unified conceptual framework inspired explicitly by the OAIS reference model (ISO16363). This presentation will outline how RSI is operationalising OAIS principles to create a coherent preservation strategy that seamlessly integrates analogue legacy carriers, their digitized counterparts and born digital audiovisual content into a single long term preservation framework.

The talk will illustrate:

1. how RSI is developing its Preservation Plan, governing preservation actions, responsibilities and formats across all media types, including a policy of digitise or dismiss for analogue carriers;
2. how analogue preservation, digitisation workflows, digital repository requirements and risk based dismission policies are getting connected to OAIS functions (AIP creation, ingest, preservation planning, archival storage, data management);
3. how RSI is reinforcing its digital preservation infrastructure to move towards compliance with ISO16363 aligned criteria as a precondition for dismissal of analog originals.
4. how preservation choices for analogue film, video, audio and non broadcast collections are integrated with digital preservation planning, format sustainability and migration strategies;
5. how an archiving by design approach aims to ensure that new digital, web only and social media content enters the archive in OAIS consistent ways, with sustainable formats and reliable metadata.
6. How RSI will ensure the long-term sustainability of the project by formalizing operational procedures into maintainable documents, fostering knowledge transfer through mentoring and training, and defining key RSI roles to guarantee continuity, supported by a monitoring plan, future implementation roadmap, and compliance checklist.

The session will provide a concrete case study of how a medium sized public broadcaster can align organisational transformation, analogue to digital continuity, and OAIS based governance, ensuring preservation decisions remain transparent, scalable and future proof.

The National Theatre has undertaken a significant transformation of its digital archive, migrating more than 150,000 assets and 200TB of material from fragmented legacy systems into a unified, sustainable preservation and access platform.

This presentation examines how the organisation moved away from disconnected spreadsheets, bespoke metadata structures and a limited discovery interface to build an intuitive, standards‑aligned environment that supports long‑term access and organisational engagement. The session outlines the shift to using the Dublin Core metadata schema, the adoption of CSV‑based bulk ingest, and the decision to treat each production as a discrete workflow; an approach that made large‑scale migration achievable and encouraged wider staff participation. It also highlights how the new platform has improved discovery, increased visibility of creative roles across productions, and strengthened cross‑departmental collaboration by lowering technical barriers.

Attendees will gain practical insights into modernising legacy digital archives, designing scalable ingest strategies, and preparing for system decommissioning in complex environments.

This presentation will focus on the challenges and learnings from the project to digitise local News cut stories held across the English regions. From the challenge of preserving this content while we still have the head life, support and expertise, to realising the opportunities of the regions moving to fully digital workflows, releasing physical storage and maximising the value of this collection to support the BBC’s Across the UK strategy.

The project includes around 26000 video tapes and 15000 Film reels and we’ll cover the steps from planning and preparing the collections, preserving the metadata, to logistics and digitisation as well as curatorial considerations which help support the BBC’s editorial and commercial ambitions.

These are live collections and therefore there is a requirement to provide continued access while the collections are transferred from physical carrier to digital.

Robust processes and quality assurance are key to driving confident disposal decisions of the digitised assets.
Eight months into the project, the workflows and processes have bedded in offering us a chance to reflect on the experience and successes so far.

The current methodology to correct azimuth on quarter inch audio tape based upon a combination of spectral tools and listening abilities has led in the last 25 years to common practices how to digitize tapes with wrongly adjusted azimuth. In a recent field test with senior archive audio engineers and young students, a test was done to compare different approaches how to adjust azimuth – based upon ears, spectral tools, and completely new approaches. The test results of traditional and new methodologies will be presented, which might put a new light and a question in the way how collections have been digitised in the past.