IASA 2017 Annual Conference

This paper addresses the challenges of managing the collection of Señal Memoria, the project in charge of preserving the audiovisual heritage of the public broadcasting network in Colombia : approximately 350.000 sound and moving image analog carriers that not only document the history of Colombian public broadcasting, but also constitute key sources to understand the country's recent history.
Starting in 2013, Señal Memoria has had to cope with more than six decades of inaction ( the first public radio record is from 1940, whereas the first TV document is from 1954), by designing a long-term preservation and accessibility policy in which sound and audiovisual collections will be integrated to constitute the country's first public broadcasting archive. At the same time, these collections will have to supply material to the public broadcasting network (RTVC) for their daily programming, because the archive is part of the organization.
From storage to cataloging, from ingest to programming, the project has had to build collection management and preservation policies from scratch. The integration of sound and audiovisual collections is one of the key issues in the agenda, knowing that both the conservation of the carriers and the description of the records demands special treatment depending of the nature of the documents, but also, that the historical value of the archive has to be presented and understood by the end user as a whole.