Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis

Increasingly television heritage is being digitized and made accessible to non-industry users, enabling ‘the archival turn’: the study of online archives so as to revisit the dominant discourses in television historiography. This article discusses both conceptual and practical perspectives on online television heritage within a broader European framework. It starts from the notion of connectivity, pointing to the development of the archive as a network of connections and continues to address the dynamics involved in the transformation of the television archive into an online presentation including the most relevant actors. With the help of examples from Dutch and European television heritage projects the article discusses how the new archive is capable of mediating between the past and present, between history and memory, between curatorial perspectives and popular uses. It concludes on the challenges that (European) online television heritage offers in the field of television historiography and theory.

This article analyzes the methodological challenges and the opportunities for future research that are triggered by the rising availability of large databases of digitalized historical newspapers. It argues that these are new sources that differ fundamentally from their analogue equivalents. Media historians have to be aware of the methodological problems that occur when analogue papers are transformed into digital objects. Especially searching digital data with key words is challenging. This implicates that scholars have to make their search strategies explicit and have to be transparent about their methodology. Moreover, it is argued that digitalized newspapers should not be used (solely) for ‘cherry picking’: the eclectic search for quotations that illustrate and liven up a historical argument. Instead newspapers should be considered a serial source that should be studied systematically. The availability of digitized newspapers could so encourage the study and the development of new methodologies for analysing newspaper content.

Digitization of Dutch cultural heritage collections is speeding up. Yet, still only a small portion of all analogue collections can be consulted online in digital format. Often digital collections remain hidden from use and cannot be searched through properly. Current research on user behaviour of students – important consumers for the future – shows that they mainly collect their information from the Internet. Non-digital collections disappear out of sight. How can heritage institutes meet these changing circumstances? Foremost, more and higher quality digitization is required. Standardisation is an absolute necessity, to present the material consistently online, to connect to other collections and to preserve the digitized assets over time. Joint cooperation and coordination are crucial determinators in this process. In order to play an important role in the future, heritage institutions have to reinvent themselves. Authenticity, durability, quality and reliability are key factors that are becoming ever more important in the constantly growing digital domain. Exactly here heritage institutes can play a major role.

Cultural heritage collections are to be found in cyberspace. Almost all heritage organisations have websites showing their collections. Digitizing the collections to present them online was not just meant to preserve old and fragile objects. Another goal was to be achieved, namely to strengthen the Dutch national identity, in particular that of young people. Two case studies are presented in this article: how do thirteen and fourteen year old pupils use the digitized collections with their history assignments? This research shows that websites of the cultural heritage organisations are not popular among these pupils. Hence the question why they make so little use of these websites. The main explanations for this appears to be that the websites are not easy to find by the search engines due to the lack of hyperlinks. Another cause may consist in the conservative attitude of the professionals in the field of cultural heritage.

Creating a photo database for research purposes offers many opportunities: find specific photos within a large set of images, link photos to other relevant pictures within the database or find similar photos. This article discusses the possibilities and difficulties when creating a research photo database, focusing on the process of describing photos. Which words can and should be used to describe a photo? Which thesaurus is suitable to describe visual resources and do different people describe the same photo in the same manner? These questions are addressed in the context of the development of a photo database for a research project on Dutch iconic photographs. By showing the difference in the assigned keywords of a photo of a Dutch politician in three archives, the article shows there will always be a difference in the connotation process of images when applying words to describe visual sources. Therefore, the author pleads to investigate the possibilities of image recognition software for describing photos.

The proliferation of digital technologies has changed the way we perceive of and use audiovisual archives and their holdings. The emergence of virtual archives and online portals is changing the relation between the keepers and users of audiovisual heritage, challenging the role of the archivist as principal expert on the knowledge the collection represents. In this article I investigate the implications of these developments for the status of the (audiovisual) archive as a gatekeeper of knowledge. Author discusses a recent experiment with social tagging, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision’s video labeling game waisda?, and asks to what extent experiments like this destabilize the existing archival platforms for validating and describing audiovisual heritage. She argues that, even though these new forms of access introduce a new type of ‘participatory knowledge’, in fact digitization only exposes the archives’ inherently dynamic, performative nature.