TV Archives: Checklist of Indicators of Participation in the Digital Environment

Abstract

The audiovisual archives of public television channels constitute an essential element for understanding recent history. This European heritage is managed through different preservation models according to the country. The need to assert the role of the audiovisual archive as a mainstay of public audiovisual content, due not only to its heritage value but also to its exploitation value, is considered. At the methodological level, the foundations of a checklist of assessment indicators with two pillars is proposed: transparency and degree of online access. For the sample, four audiovisual archives of European television channels were used which illustrate different models of conservation and dissemination: British Broadcasting Corporation Archives (BBC) (United Kingdom), Institut National de l’audiovisuel (National Audiovisual Institute) (France), Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision) (Netherlands), and the Archivo de Radio Televisión Española (RTVE Archive) (Spain). Although European dissemination policies rely on their major role as aggregators of cultural content and increasingly promote their content in the media sphere, the situation of their participation is very irregular. The results reveal very inconsistent dissemination and digitisation policies, low levels of transparency, and policies of limited exploitation of content.