The television archives: strategies to showcase their value in the transmedia age

This article analyses the different transmedia strategies that European television archives can potentially use to showcase and promote their collections. Methods: The study is based on the case study of four European television archives that follow different models of conservation and access: The British Broadcasting Corporation Archives (BBC, United Kingdom), the Institut National de l'audiovisuel (France), the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (Netherlands) and the RTVE Archive (Spain). Information was collected from the websites and Twitter accounts of these archives and subsequently analysed using three evaluation categories: Expanded Access, Repackaged Content and Ancillary Content. Results: It was concluded that the most frequent strategies were those related to expanded access, particularly with a contextual purpose: commemorations, anniversaries and to illustrate recent events with images from the past. Discussion: Many transmedia strategies are not being implemented by some of the selected television archives. Conclusions: Unlike other cultural heritage institutions that use transmedia strategies to showcase their collections, television archives are in a premature stage in relation to the reuse of this kind of content.

The television archives: strategies to showcase their value in the transmedia age Articles