Convincing politicians of the merit and importance of audiovisual archiving in order to obtain structural funding can prove to be an arduous taks. Just ask any employee of the Flemish Institute of Archiving (VIAA).
Founded in 2013 by the flemish government, VIAA is a networked partner organisation responsible for the digitisation, sustainable preservation and disclosure of AV content from a diverse array of Flemish media and cultural heritage partners.
Rewind to June 2015: due to a change of government in Flanders, the future of VIAA was uncertain (with employees of VIAA even put on precautionary leave!!)
VIAA’s main challenge was to get policymakers on the bandwagon.
Can prove to be an arduous task.
We asked our team: how can we win the hearts and minds of the public opinion and Flemish public figures, leave a lasting impression in the media and hence solidify our position as an integral asset to the preservation of intangible heritage?
Several brainstorming sessions later, the team emerged with an idea for a BLITZ-CAMPAIGN to garner the necessary publicity.
We wanted to launch a website accessible to everyone in Flanders, with 50 one-to-three minute video clips from 27 partner organisations in the media and heritage sector.
By presenting people with extraordinary snippets of daily life from the past century up until now, we proved that in another hundred years we will be glad we preserved this content so everyone can glimpse into history.
Where the funding of an archive is concerned, the discussion tends to focus merely on the financial aspect, with the value of the actual content overlooked.
Besides creating a platform for digitisation and sustainable preservation of audiovisual archive content, VIAA’s other objective is to show that intangible cultural heritage is equally as valuable as its tangibe counterpart and should therefore also be made accessible to the public. But many archives containing relevant material encounter obstacles for that to actually happen, often pertaining to copyright. This is also a huge challenge for VIAA. This campaign to a broad public prooved to be very succesfull and rewarding. Nevertheless, when is comes to daily disclosure of AV archive content through interactive platforms, we are limited by copyright. We do have a platform for education, enabling teachers to access, discover and use AV archive content in class.
