Radiotelevisione Italiana’s archive digitisation project: Bringing new life to newsreels
Abstract
This paper discusses the Radiotelevisione Italiana’s (RAI’s) Newsreels Digitisation Project — a major initiative to safeguard and enhance one of Italy’s most significant audiovisual collections: approximately 10,000 hours of news content produced between 1952 and 1985 and stored on about 350,000 16-mm film reels. These materials capture political, social and cultural life during the formative decades of Italian television, when RAI was the country’s sole national broadcaster. Unfortunately, many reels are affected by vinegar syndrome and long-term storage degradation, making urgent intervention essential. The project combines outsourced preparation and digitisation with in-house governance, metadata management, quality control (QC) and editorial reconstruction. Standardised, interoperable formats are used to create high-quality masters, alongside mezzanine and proxy files for preservation, production reuse and public access. AI tools support metadata extraction and content enrichment, improving searchability and access. RAI ensures endto- end coordination, including metadata verification, film reels logistics, synchronisation of video and separated magnetic audio and ingestion into the media asset management platform. The initiative contributes to the creation of a national audiovisual portal, offering controlled access to universities and public institutions. It demonstrates a scalable model for heritage digitisation, highlighting the value of structured outsourcing, strong technical specifications, rigorous QC and well-coordinated workflows. RAI believes this to be an effective approach to integrating internal and external workflows, leveraging the strengths of both. This article is also included in The Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at http://hstalks.com/business.
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Author's Biography
Roberto Borgotallo is a telecommunications engineer at Radiotelevisione Italiana’s (RAI’s) Centre for Research and Technological Innovation, where he works on initiatives in multimedia preservation and audiovisual quality control in collaboration with the European Broadcasting Union. His responsibilities include metadata extraction and modelling, drafting technical specifications for public digitisation tenders, and designing complex systems such as Digimaster, RAI’s large-scale in-house archive digitisation platform. A graduate in telecommunications engineering from the Politecnico di Torino, he has been part of RAI’s research activities since 2001, with a continuing focus on digital media technologies and emerging methods for content management.
Giuliano Donnini is the technical coordinator for the large-scale digitisation of video magnetic recordings and film carriers within Radiotelevisione Italiana’s (RAI’s) Archives Department. He oversees the operational and technical aspects of the media digitisation and preservation sector, ensuring the long-term safeguarding of RAI’s audiovisual heritage. He is also an ordinary member of the Preservation and Migration Commission of the International Federation of Television Archives (FIAT/IFTA).
Alberto Messina leads Radiotelevisione Italiana’s (RAI’s) research and development activities on artificial intelligence systems for content management at the Centre for Research and Technological Innovation. His work spans archive information management, automated production, intelligent systems, digital accessibility and publishing services. He is the author of more than 100 scientific publications and holds a degree in electronic engineering as well as a PhD in business and management with a specialisation in computer science. A former contract professor at the Polytechnic of Turin, he contributes actively to international standardisation bodies, particularly the European Broadcasting Union and MPEG.
Maurizio Montagnuolo is a senior research engineer at Radiotelevisione Italiana’s (RAI’s) Centre for Research and Technological Innovation. His professional interests include multimedia data mining and artificial intelligence, and his work in these fields has been published in a number of international journals and presented at various conferences. He contributes to several national and international projects in digital archiving and automated metadata extraction.
