The cultural challenge to globalisation : what is at stake for television archives ?

Paper presented by Emmanuel Hoog
at the Asia Media Summit, Kuala Lumpur, 9th May 2005

Broadcast archives have a full part to play in the debate

I am very honoured to have been invited to take part in your debate, as President of FIAT IFTA, the International Federation of Television Archives, and as Chairman and Managing Director of INA, the French Institut National de l'Audiovisuel

I would like to talk to you about television and radio archives, our audiovisual heritage, a "monument" that bears witness to the last sixty years of our history and to the diversity of our cultures. Because television is not just an industry, it deserves to be passed on to future generations.

I would like to give you an example.

The audiovisual archives from Afghanistan survived the Taliban regime mainly hidden behind walls. For the last three years, we have cooperated with our Afghan colleagues to restore and digitise this archive material. Today, 60% of the programmes broadcast at the Afghan Public Television are coming from digitised archives.

Another example : four days ago, I was in Phnom Penh, discussing with Cambodian authorities, in order to restore a part of their audiovisual memory by providing a digitised copy of all the materials that we have in our collections in Paris. In the digital era, any copy equals the original material. What is important is content. The carrier of the content does not matter.

The built heritage is preserved on a national, terrestrial basis, whereas the audiovisual heritage offers many opportunities to be circulated and shared.

Audiovisual archives and cultural diversity are naturally linked, for two main reasons.

• The first one is related to the usual understanding that we have of this issue. Audiovisual archives belong to the world of memory, and memory is the basis of our culture. The addition of the various cultures makes up our diversity. In that way, when an archive dies, an identity gets injured and the cultural diversity gets poorer.
• But the cultural diversity is not only the addition of national or local identities, it is also the result of the new communication capacity among these identities. The digital techniques offer new opportunities for identities to get wealthier.

Traditionally, it is the addition of identities that make up the cultural diversity. In the digital era, this remains true, but it is more, it is the wealth and vitality of the cultural diversity itself that make strong identities.

We should not be afraid of globalisation, if each cultural identity has been able to digitise its own heritage. This is a key issue.

A vast heritage under threat

Audiovisual archives make up a colossal heritage - 200 million hours of audio and video programmes according to UNESCO estimates -, and this heritage is under threat. Every day, archives are disappearing. In ten years, or at best in fifteen, it will be too late to save them! According to UN, 80% will die. This is a planned tragedy.

The dangers are many:

1. The first danger is the fragile nature of the media involved: in most cases only a single copy of the programme is kept. Videotapes deteriorate, and film does too because of the vinegar syndrome

2. old format playback equipment, such as the two-inch VTR, is no longer manufactured, and spare parts are not available

3. poor climatic conditions, particularly in the tropics, accelerate the deterioration of archive media. Archives do not like humidity, or dust, or heat …

4. wars put at risk images, which are one of the main targets of the warring parties: they are confiscated or even destroyed, as happened in Cambodia

5. lastly, negligence and a lack of cataloguing make it impossible to use archives since their content remains unknown.

These dangers are more or less the same everywhere, in Paris and New York, Kabul and Beijing. And yet, do we really want to live in a world with no memory? With no archives?

An invaluable heritage

As soon as archives are accessible, in other words preserved, documented and digitised, demand for them soars. This is the surest way of determining the value of archives.

For broadcasters, the archives are one of the company assets. Using archives, editorial staff can put today's events in perspective, producers can make historical documentaries, and managers can diversify the company's activities by creating themed channels and Internet sites and publishing videos.

Globalisation is an advantage for archives

Globalisation can be a good thing for archives.

What strikes me today is that all the archives in the world, in Malaysia or Algeria, just as in France or the United States, are faced with the same technological developments and the same issues: preservation, selection, access and the advent of digital technology, which has forced us to stop and think again, in terms of both technology and archive management. Migration is the only way. What technological choices should we make? How should we organise the migration of archived programmes? How should we reorganise archive collection, storage and access procedures? This is what we are going to address in this afternoon's workshop dedicated to digital archiving.

Being faced with the same questions means being able to share knowledge and good practices and work together to find the solutions. Our salvation lies in cooperation, international cooperation. We must not remain isolated. As an example, I would like to recommend you to join the International Federation of Television Archives (FIAT/IFTA), the top professional organisation in the world of television archives. IFTA brings together the world's biggest archive centres (such as BBC, CBS, CNN, CCTV, Doordarshan, France Télévisions, …) and top experts, and they are all determined to advance the cause of archives. It was IFTA, for example, that last October launched an Appeal to save the world's audiovisual heritage, an appeal that has already collected some 8,000 signatures in 87 countries and that will be officially presented to the United Nations next September. During the Asia Media Summit, there is a stand where you can sign the Call for the preservation of the world broadcast heritage.

Broadcasters are in the front line…

In conclusion, I would like to make the most of the presence here of all of the region's broadcasters, to address them directly and stress how vital it is that they assume responsibility for archives. Because it is they who hold the majority of archives. I know that it is not always easy to give priority to archives. But if we wait, it will be too late…

Two days ago, I had the pleasure to meet the director of the Brunei Television. This is an interesting example of a broadcaster who has given high priority to archives and who has just launched the digitisation of its TV archives.

We should urgently digitise our moving images. First, as I said before, to avoid that these images disappear, second, in order to give them a new life. This is not the same at all. Actually, in the digital era, a new geography of knowledge is emerging. To morrow, there will be the knowledge, the heritage, the history and culture that will be digitised, and that consequently could circulate, exist, and develop themselves to the contact of others. On the other hand, there will be the non digitised knowledge, heritage, history, culture, that will, step by step, be marginalized. Thus the cultural diversity gets through the digitisation of contents and knowledge. More than any other kind of content, the audiovisual archives represent the history of our last fifty years of history and culture. Their digitisation is the necessary condition for preserving the cultural diversity, on a worldwide scale.

Thank you.

Emmanuel Hoog
President and Managing Director of the National Audiovisual Institute
President of the International Federation of Television Archives
9th May 2005