Designing and Building the Post-Analogue Audiovisual Archive

Jan Müller, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, FIAT/IFTA President

The presentation addresses the challenges related to the role and function of audiovisual archive institutions as the environment they operate in becomes more and more digital and networked. The context is the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision; a leading audiovisual archive that successfully made the transition to the digital domain. Its ever-growing collections today comprise over a million hours of audiovisual content – from film, television and radio broadcasts, music recording and web videos. Operating in such a new, post-analogue context has profound implications institutions must respond to. The fundamental challenge is how the public mission of archives (i.e. supporting a myriad of users to utilize collections to learn, experience and create) can be achieved in a digital context. ‘Creative Technology’ plays an important role in building the audiovisual archive of the future. To manage the transition, Sound and Vision launched a process of internal review and assessment. In the course of this two-year process, it drafted a new mission statement, defined a new strategic plan and built a new organizational structure from the ground up.

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