Contents:
- Television Heritage and Television History
- Framing TV History: Audiovisual Archives as Repositories for Television’s Past
- Digitisation: From Depositories of TV History to ‘Participatory Archives’
- Metadata as Intermediaries of Knowledge
- From ultimate knowledge to permanent rewriting and addition: the Dynarchive
- Case Study: Video Active
- Conclusion
The author investigates the implications of online access to television archival material on the knowledge it represents. She discusses two kinds of impact via the following research questions: To what extent is the authoritative knowledge traditionally associated with the archive challenged by digitisation and online access?What happens to the ‘history’ in television history when its digitised source material has become part of an eternal online present? In the case study Video Active, the first European online portal to access television archives across Europe, is discussed. Due to the great diversity in the collections, this portal is still much more an example of the archives and universities as gatekeepers of knowledge than a demonstration of the participatory digital dynarchive. Although one would expect that due to the combination of technological consequences of the digitisation of the archive and the potentially participatory nature of online archives, the authoritative knowledge long associated with the archive might yield to a more consensual type of knowledge. The author concludes that in practice, though, the traditional archival structure is still firmly in place. For television historians to be able to write histories of television that revive the past in a meaningful present, in the opinion of the author extra metadata are essential, next to the metadata needed to identify and retrieve digital archival objects. The references to the lifecycles of the objects, describing the various stages of production, description, storage and re-use are considered crucial information for reconstructing the various instances of framing that determine the object’s meaning, including the tacit narratives of the archival process. This article is published in: Critical Studies in Television: An International Journal of Television Studies, Volume 5, Number 2, November 2010 , pp. 1-19(19). A download of the PDF file costs $42.55 .
Interessant artikel voor het management van een AV-archief dat samenwerking met andere AV-archieven overweegt. Zet tot nadenken over de houdbaarheid van het idee van een collectie of archief, bij het aanbieden van een selectie uit het digitale AV-archief op het internet, bijvoorbeeld in een thematische portal. Bevat ook bruikbare argumenten voor beleidsmakers die het belang van metadata moeten bepleiten.