This White Paper is commissioned by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in an effort to build a common platform for all the stakeholders – large, small; witting, unwitting – in the preservation of audiovisual heritage to consider the urgency of collective action in a fast-moving and increasingly strange world, a world where concerted efforts to preserve and share our information and knowledge are now more important than ever. The White Paper is intended for circulation in October 2017 among leaders of cultural and educational institutions participating in the 2017 FIAT/IFTA World Conference in Mexico – and at that meeting to help a new international thought leadership group to articulate, perhaps starting with the 10 key points below, an international research and action agenda and certain funding priorities for our audiovisual cultural heritage sector, broadly defined, over the next 10 years.

1. Erwin Verbruggen, Johan Oomen (NISV)
Peter Kaufman (Intelligent Television)
Johan Oomen, Erwin Verbruggen
Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
Peter B. Kaufman
Intelligent Television, MIT
October 21, 2017
Towards a Think Tank for Audiovisual Archivists and
Cultural Heritage Professionals

2. …how can we meet the challenges
of the future?

3. …what are those challenges?

5. “The challenges facing the
library field from ever-
increasing globalisation
can only be met and
overcome by an inclusive,
global response from a
united library field.”

7. http://tinyurl.com/AVthinktank

8. think tank core
• Lora Aroyo - Professor Human Computer Interaction, VU University
• Bill Thompson - Head of Partnership Development, BBC
• Jean-Hugues Chenot - Project Manager, INA
• Lai Tee Phang - Deputy Director, Audio Visual Archives, National Archives of Singapore
• Paul Gerhardt - Director of Education, BFI
• Pelle Snickars - Professor of Media & Communication Studies, Umeå University
• Richard Ranft - Head of Sound & Vision, The British Library
• Tony Ageh - Chief Digital Officer, New York Public Library
• William Uricchio - Professor of Comparative Media Studies, MIT

9. 1. Conduct a global inventory of archival holdings
2. Focus on discoverability
3. Explore relationships with the private sector
4. Experiment within AV archives (AI, curation)
5. Engage more fully with Wikipedia
recommendations

10. 6. Deploy free and liberal licenses and free and open
standards
7. Explore future revenue models
8. Engage archivists to work more closely with producers
and creators
9. Engage archivists as educators
10: Engage archives with issues in the media/political/
cultural arena
recommendations

11. “We need guidelines of dealing
with new formats and new
materials”
“What can the film-
producer community do
to better promote our
archives?”
“Files without sufficient metadata constitute a black hole”
cc-by-sa: Erwin Verbruggen
cc-by-sa: Erwin Verbruggen

12. “we must focus on ‘the
diffusion of this patrimony’”
cc-by-sa: Erwin Verbruggen
cc-by-sa: Erwin Verbruggen
“We have to know our
catalogs - the size of the
whole dinosaur”

13. “we have to better understand how to work with – and in
effect use – the crowd because . . . who owns these
memories, after all?”
cc-by-sa: Erwin Verbruggencc-by-sa: Erwin Verbruggen

14. •Work on discoverability
AI for knowledge extraction (recommendation 2 and 4)
Connect collections (1)
•Forging new collaborations to increase impact
…with producers and creators (8)
…with 3rd party platforms (3, 4, 5)
…within the organization, f.i. to execute a social media strategy
•New approaches to managing copyright
Creative Commons and Wikipedia projects (5, 6)
New ways to measure impact (6, 7)
Hot topics FIAT-IFTA

15. •Work on discoverability
AI for knowledge extraction (recommendation 2 and 4)
Connect collections (1)
•Forging new collaborations to increase impact
…with producers and creators (8)
…with 3rd party platforms (3, 4)
…within the organization, f.i. to execute a social media strategy
•New approaches to managing copyright
Creative Commons and Wikipedia projects (5, 6)
New ways to measure impact (6, 7)
Hot topics FIAT-IFTA
don’t forget digitisation!

16. Follow ups!
• Virtual meeting with the core members
• Publish the white paper in december
• Include examples from FIAT-IFTA members
• Early 2018 work on an action plan

17. Please join the
conversation!
rd@beeldengeluid.nl
#AVthinktank