Enhancing the value of local televisions’ archives. The archiving project of Belgium’s French-speaking local television stations.
Anne VIVÉ (BE) Archivist / Project Coordinator -- Fédération Belge des TV Locales Francophones (Namur)
Local television stations have their own history. The sequences that they have produced over the years have accumulated to form their heritage. This heritage, which is a living record of local television stations and regional development, is in a state of constant formation.
Today, it is proving difficult to manage, both from the standpoint of the medium (physical deterioration of cassettes, space used up) and content (feeding the database, lack of standards, etc.).
Yet, it is a wonderful reservoir of images that could be used not only by television itself but also via the sales hubs that are developing on Internet.
Belgium’s French-speaking local television stations are keen to exploit their archives and find solutions to meet tomorrow’s expected challenges and so they asked their Federation to study the matter with the particular aim of examining each station’s specific organisation and developing some ways to find the solution.
What should be selected? On what media should the heritage be conserved? How should these images be stored and managed? What forms of consultation and dissemination should be considered? These were some of the questions we reviewed.
At the end of this study, priority was given to optimising and harmonising the television stations’ archiving procedures. This is the first phase of the ARCHE (Archivage Harmonisé Elémentaire for "Elementary Harmonised Archiving") project, which will ultimately lead to the creation of an exchange network among the twelve television stations concerned.
The presentation of our project and our study’s findings will include proposed solutions on a local television scale. In the course of this "case study", we hope also to trigger off an exchange of ideas and experiences in this area.
The RTC TV Online Experience
Jean-Louis RADOUX (BE) Director -- RTC TV Liège (Liège)
Our channel was founded in 1977.
In line with the vast majority of other channels, building a library was our «last» preoccupation, the one you think of when everything else is done. Like everyone else, we have a database with references of all our programmes.
In 1994, having realised how often we had to re-shoot some pictures, it became clear it would be necessary to build an image library with an innovation: we wanted to sort the documents by title and analysis on a dedicated software.
Static archiving became the first step. It was combined with new ways of transmission.
To that end, in 1996, with the rapid development of the Internet, the database was available on the website of our channel, www.rtc.be
Now, with the arrival of digital technologies, new developments will allow consultation, at low resolution, of an ensemble of productions enabling the conservation on DVD and also the possibility of inter-connection between televisions at low cost.
From an old fashioned vision, archiving is now looking at the future : from the start, a document is archived and available to others on the Internet, archiving and broadcasting are linked to give it a new dimension and a new value. Our aim is to take part fully in this evolution.
The "Canal Blau" digital experience
Joan C. LLUCH (ES) Manager -- Canal Blau Informació (Vilanova La Geltrù)
One of the criteria Canal Blau Information - the municipal television of Vilanova i la Geltrú - has used in establishing the new operational systems of the communicative process of television, radio and internet, has been the digitalisation and coordination of all of them.
In this way, the whole process of reception of images, edition, file and broadcasting has a common factor : the use of digital systems.
This process has been considered for use in the future as file and bank images, excelling the strict sense of television and broadening all the possibilities to be broadcast in terrestrial, digital, UMTS, webcasting in the concept related to television "à la carte", Interactive TV, and all the innovations that arise from comprehension of the image.