Students from the MA programme Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image participated in the 2014 World Conference of FIAT/IFTA. They share their impressions in a series of blog reports. Lenka Suchá wrote this report.
The next stop on the Digital Journey on Thursday afternoon was introduced by Andy O’Dwyer, Chair of FIAT/IFTA’s Television Studies Commission, and Herbert Hayduck, the Federation’s Vice President. The first two presentations by Magdalena Reitbauer and Dana Mustata (University of Groningen) were based on pilot studies carried out in 2014 with the support of FIAT/IFTA’s television studies grant, which is a new initiative to encourage training and research as a way of “giving back”. They were followed by two case studies of digitisation and digital workflow implementation, courtesy of Delphine Wibaux of INA and Maggie Lydon of the BBC.
Having identified a gap in research, Magdalena Reitbauer (University of Vienna) and her team developed the Broadcast Anniversaries project, looking at dramaturgical ideas and principal concepts of broadcast institution anniversaries. They focused on broadcasters from Germany, the UK, Ireland, Italy and Czech Republic, and analysed a variety of ways they approached the handling of anniversary broadcasts. A common trend of increased online and social media presence was identified, although it was still mainly uni-directional and there is great potential to develop interactivity to engage younger viewers.
Dana Mustata delivered an enthusiastic talk about the Post-Socialist Television History Network that brought together researchers working with archives in Romania, the Czech Republic, Serbia, Hungary and others. A key part of the project is to provide access not just to the content on its own, but also to the different broadcast cultures and their context via alternative sources, such as audience research documents, interviews and private notes and letters. The collaborative nature of the project is vital, as language often forms a major barrier to access.
Research project presentations gave way to more hands-on ones, with Delphine Wibaux giving the audience a run-down of the Balkans Memory Project. Its key aims were to appraise the situation in public service media and film archives of the Balkan countries, to develop the flow of know-how and sharing of material and information, to create a network of regional archivists and to increase awareness about the issues faced by these archives. The ambitious project is now coming to a close after 3 years and its outcomes and perspectives will be discussed at a conference in Sarajevo in November.
Maggie Lydon closed off the session by providing insight into BBC Archive’s transition into Media Management brought about by the digital shift. The presentation started with an impressive, fast-paced video that showcased the broad range of material the BBC Archive has to deal with. Staff described their experience of the transition and it became clear that in case of a large-scale project like the BBC Archive, the process has to be carefully planned and managed. The huge training exercise of converting librarians into media managers involves getting them to understand their new role in the digital workflow, which is much more intertwined with the production process. As suggested in the Q&A after the session, a vital part of the process is making sure staff from different backgrounds end up meeting the same standard. Despite this ambitious undertaking, the year in media management has been, according to staff testimonies, “Amazing!”
FIAT/IFTA Award winners on stage during the awards dinner. Photo credit: Oscar Timmers.
The reports on the first two studies will be available on the FIAT/IFTA’s website within the next few weeks.
More info
- See more photos, presentations and papers over at the FIAT/IFTA website