Preservation & Migration Seminar 2026

Since 1995, the Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA) has been entrusted with the legal deposit of audiovisual works in France. Its responsibilities include preserving and ensuring accessibility to all broadcast programs for research purposes. Additionally, INA has been doing off-air TV & radio recording since 2002, collecting an impressive 24 million hours of audiovisual content.

The increasing volume of content recorded under legal deposit has made traditional shelf-based storage impractical. It has become essential to centralize the files within INA’s digital preservation storage to ensure their long-term preservation, rapid access, and facilitate future archival migrations. One approach has been to develop a direct flow of new incoming files to the digital library. The second step, taking place between 2023 – 2028, is to migrate all 15 millions hours of back programs stored on older storage media (DVDs, SDLTs, LTOs) to INA’s main LTO 9 library.

The large-scale migration campaign is carried out entirely in-house and led by the off-air recording department. This presentation will focus on the design, planning and implementation of the migration of 320.000 DVDs, covering the period 2002-2008. The first part of the presentation will be dedicated to a general overview of the project and its scope before delving into the specific tools developed for the project, and in particular its driving force, the INA-built software “Migramann.”