Designing and building the post-analogue audiovisual archive

Abstract

This paper addresses the challenges related to the role and function of audiovisual archive institutions as the environment in which they operate becomes increasingly digital and networked. The context is the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (Sound and Vision), a leading audiovisual archive that has successfully transitioned to the digital domain. Its ever-growing collections today comprise more than a million hours of audiovisual content, ranging from film to television and radio broadcasts, music recording and web videos. For eight years now, born-digital assets from various sources have been incorporated in a state-of-the-art digital archive. Most of the analogue holdings have been digitised through a national digitisation programme that ended in 2015. Operating in such a new, post-analogue context has profound implications for institutes. The fundamental challenge is how the public mission of archives (ie, supporting a myriad of users to utilise 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 organisational structure from the ground up.