The End of the Television Archive as We Know It? The National Archive as an Agent of Historical Knowledge in the Convergence Era

Professionals in the television industry are working towards a certain future—rather than end—for the medium based on multi-platform storytelling, as well as multiple screens, distribution channels and streaming platforms. They do so rooted in institutional frameworks where traditional conceptualizations of television still persist. In this context, we reflect on the role of the national television archive as an agent of historical knowledge in the convergence era. Contextualisa-tion and infrastructure function as important preconditions for users of archives to find their way through the enormous amounts of audio-visual material. Specifically, we consider the case of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, taking a critical stance towards the archive’s practices of contextualisation and preservation of audio-visual footage in the convergence era. To do so, this article considers the impact of online circulation, contextualisation and preservation of audio-visual materials in relation to, first, how media policy complicates the re-use of material, and second, the archive’s use by television professionals and media researchers. This article reflects on the possibilities for and benefits of systematic archiving, developments in web archiving, and accessibility of production and contextual documentation of public broadcasters in the Netherlands. We do so based on an analysis of internal documentation, best practices of archive-based history programmes and their related cross-media practices, as well as media policy documentation. We consider how audio-visual archives should deal with the shift towards multi-platform productions, and argue for both a more systematic archiving of production and contextual documentation in the Netherlands, and for media researchers who draw upon archival resources to show a greater awareness of an archive’s history. In the digital age, even more people are part of the archive’s processes of selection and aggregation, affecting how the past is preserved through audio-visual images.


Introduction
Television increasingly plays an important role in present-day societies by making archival and contextual materials accessible on online platforms.Televisual practices that re-use archival footage also connect users with the past and provide necessary contextual frameworks through cross-media and transmedia storytelling (Hagedoorn, 2016, p. 168).This is especially due to improvements in the digitisation of audio-visual archival collections, a development in the digital era of which the Netherlands is an important frontrunner (Consortium Beelden voor de Toekomst, 2015).Many hours of audio-visual material have been digitised in the Netherlands since 2007 thanks to a governmentfinanced programme called Images for the Future (http://www.beeldenvoordetoekomst.nl).As a result, the access to film and television programmes from the past has increased immensely, offering more opportunities for re-use.In this process described as the archival turn (De Leeuw, 2011, p. 11), infrastructure and contextualisation function as important preconditions for users of archives to find their way through the enormous amounts of audio-visual material.Such users include television programme makers, media professionals and academic researchers.
At present, the 'end of' television is often predicted, particularly for broadcast television.Creators and policy makers are working towards a certain futurerather than end-for the medium based on multiplatform storytelling, multiple screens, distribution channels and streaming platforms, but do so rooted in national and institutional contexts where broadcasting and traditional conceptualizations of the medium still persist.In this article, we reflect on the contemporary role of the national television archive as an agent (intermediary) of historical knowledge.The function of the archive used to be defined by institutionalization and distribution, but both these pillars are changing in the convergence era.More specifically, we consider the case of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (hereafter Sound and Vision).We take a critical stance towards its practices of contextualisation and preservation of archival footage in the era of television in transition, and reflect on the tensions of preservation, re-using archival material and the 'opening' up of archives.As a result, this article reflects on the possibilities for and benefits of systematic archiving, developments in web archiving and accessibility of production and contextual documentation of public broadcasters in the Netherlands.The studied materials entail internal documentation, best practices of archive-based history programmes and their related cross-media practices, and finally, media policy documentation.
To do so, this article considers the impact of online circulation, contextualisation and preservation of audio-visual archival materials in the Netherlands on two levels.First, we consider the discourse of media policy and how media policy complicates the re-use of material.More specifically, we reflect on the relation between new policies for online, digital circulation in the context of public service broadcasting in the Netherlands.What type of contextualisation and re-use of archival material, and its connected rights issues, is anticipated in the move beyond broadcast television?Second, we consider the discourse of television archives and their use for television professionals and media researchers.What is the discourse of the Dutch audio-visual archive in these new and converging contexts, particularly regarding the archive's role and function as a content provider?In this context, we discuss the enriching of archive-based programming through cross-media practices by means of specific case studies, in particular Na de Bevrijding [After the Liberation] (NTR, 2014).Finally, we consider the relevance of systematic archiving of production and contextual documentation, especially for television studies research and the preservation of cultural heritage in the Netherlands.In conclusion, we reflect on how audio-visual archives should deal with the shift towards multi-platform productions and whether the national archive should focus more on contextual archiving in the digital era.

New Policies for Online and Digital Circulation
In the Netherlands, the public broadcasters are independent in the production of their programmes.Policy changes in the 1990s increased the direct political power over budget and organisation.Coordination, budgeting, programming and innovation are the task of a general organisation called Dutch Public Broadcasting (NPO).In the past 15 years, the power of this organisation has increased.Since the early 2010s, reducing the number of broadcasters and for broadcasters to work more efficiently have been main issues for the Dutch government.Subsequently, the public broadcasters have seen increasing budget cuts from 2010 onwards.In current media policies and strategies in the Netherlands, new forms of media use, new players in a global market and new forms of distribution have urged changes in the public media.Apart from traditional public values, such as pluralism and liability of news, creative cross-media innovation is considered crucial by the government and NPO.The function and value of public service broadcasting is thus not only in dispute as result of the competition with commercial broadcasters, but also due to changes in online transmission and digitisation.
Considering the current political debate on public broadcasting in the Netherlands, many issues relate to developments in public broadcast television at the end of the 1980s and onwards.Broadcasting in the Netherlands is an institutional as well as a political matter (Wijfjes & Smulders, 1994).Initially, starting in the early 1950s, five public broadcasting organisations in the Netherlands were producing television programmes.Halfway through the 1960s, the law was changed to offer new organisations the opportunity to become a public broadcasting organisation.From the end of the 1980s onwards, technological developments in distribution through cable and the global infrastructure by satellite gave rise to commercial television channels (see for instance Hogenkamp, De Leeuw, & Wijfjes, 2012).As a result, the function and value of public broadcasting was no longer merely an ideological debate, but also an economic one.
In this context, the Dutch media policy seems to be twofold.On the one hand, there is political discourse regarding the NPO being too focused on their own programmes.This is for example reflected in the statement by Sander Dekker, the Undersecretary for the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, that 'the programming is too much of a compromise in which individual interests and administrative agreements are too dominant' (Dekker, 2014).Here, there seems to be a return to the traditional idea of the institution of public service broadcasting in the Netherlands that originated in the early 1950s.On the other hand, changes in media use are also recognised by Dekker (2014) in his policy paper: 'The media television, radio, newspapers and the Internet are in a dynamic period in which changes follow one another in rapid succession….It is even more important for media organizations to distinguish oneself by means of unique content, due to the increase in supply and distribution routes.'Subsequently, attracting young generations in public media consumption is an important strategy for both the government and the NPO, because only an older audience is reached by merely traditional television viewing.
One proposal is changing the traditional structure: no longer exclusive airtime for broadcasters, but also for external production companies.This way, the NPO (2015, pp. 9, 18) hopes that new cross-media concepts and innovative content will be delivered.In his policy paper, Dekker (2014) claims that production at broadcasters is still traditional.However, there is no proof that this strategy will result in new formats, since broadcasters create programmes and concepts in collaboration with external producers.Many larger production companies are working globally or are part of an international conglomeration.Whereas the producers work commercially there seems to be a tension in the policy concerning the function of public service broadcasting and the business model of its innovative producers.It seems that regarding innovation, the policy stresses innovation in ways of storytelling or public participation, and more specifically in the main domains of public broadcasting, information and education.One could ask whether the government policies facilitate the public innovation it requires.Dekker's plans were challenged by many political parties and it was only after the proposal was adjusted that the new Media law was accepted in March 2016.Yet, the process of changing public broadcasting in the Netherlands is for a large part as described above.
Rather than a shift towards 'the end of television', we argue that in the Dutch televisual landscape a development towards the end of public service broadcasting as the specific institution that originated from the early 1950s can be observed-particularly its ideology towards how television is organised, and especially in more collaborative contexts.It is this end of public service television as a particular institution that is anticipated in media policy.The more collaborations of the type described above are achieved, the more this ideology and institutional organization of television will disappear.This also raises further questions regarding the traditional public service merit of public service broadcasting-inform, educate, entertain-in the convergence era and the extent in which public service broadcasting can be distinguished from commercial broadcasting.
In the contemporary media landscape, television programme makers do not only create content for television.Jenkins (2006, p. 2) has therefore described the convergence era as mapping a new territory: 'Where old and new media intersect, where grassroots and corporate media collide, where the power of the media producer and the power of the consumer interact in unpredictable ways.' In these new and changing contexts, television creators also produce specific content to be (re-)used in online and multi-platform contexts.What type of re-use of archival material and its connected rights issues is anticipated, then, in new policies for online and digital circulation, beyond broadcast television?Although watching television is still dominant, since the 2000s, advancing technology has brought a greater demand of non-linear television viewing (Sonk & De Haan, 2015, p. 123).Both television broadcasters and archives are anticipating new types of consumer engagement, including more on-demand, more open and more participatory experiences with television content.In the Netherlands, this trend has coincided with an increased production of history and documentary programming for television, making use of cross-media and interactive forms of storytelling, and subsequently, the online and digital circulation of content that re-uses archival audio-visual footage in different ways.
The increasing budget cuts in the Dutch public broadcasting system also affect the production, online presentation and online access of programmes, as well as the presentation of contextual materials like websites and supplementary content.The focus of the new policy plan for the NPO (2015) in the period 2016-2020 concerns a more integral programming and multiplatform strategy to offer broadcasts that are in line with how audiences are expected to watch television.Consequently, only websites of programmes that are actively broadcast will be available online on the NPO website (Hagedoorn, 2016, pp. 109-111).On the 'up' side, the broadcast material of past programmes will be moved to the Sound and Vision archive, which will become online and made available.Websites for strong brands that have considerable public value and reach a large audience-for instance the history series Andere Tijden [Changing Times] (NPS/NTR/VPRO, 2000-…)-will also be expanded and function as portals for dissemination of archival and contextual materials.In this context, institutional roles are visibly changing.Whilst broadcasters deliver on the level of production and presentation, the national archive is not only an active agent on the level of being a curator of cultural heritage and a supplier of audio-visual materials, but also on the level of presentation and performance.
As previous research (see also Hagedoorn, 2016) has shown, contextualisation practices are necessary to make online information usable.As De Leeuw (2012) has argued, the audience's understanding of selected content remains limited without a framework for interpretation.However, on the 'down' side, specific types of contextual materials, like websites of past programmes, will be discontinued in the Netherlands based on these new policies for online and digital circulation.Online and open environments also bring new challenges for the online circulation of re-used archival materials-including rights issues, privacy and ethical issues.Copyright and license fees to use audio-visual archival footage have to be obtained not only for broadcast on linear television, but also for on-demand distribution via the internet (see for instance Nuchelmans, 2014, p. 33).Another complication is that rightful claimants of programme copyrights need to be tracked down and financially compensated.With a greater emphasis on on-demand and open platforms, media policy and rights issues play an increased role in framing and conditioning what kind of programmes that re-use archival footage can be broadcast and circulated online.Furthermore, whereas Sound and Vision as the national archive for the audio-visual history of the Netherlands preserves Dutch television programmes, contextual materials such as websites and production research documentation are not preserved systematically (Hagedoorn, 2016, pp. 110-112).
Sound and Vision has been archiving context collections that were actively handed over by producers themselves.Whilst the archive is not purposely seeking out such collections for preservation, these context collections are supporting or auxiliary collections.However, production documentation of Dutch public broadcasters is not preserved structurally.Furthermore, the question is what content the broadcasters preserve by themselves, and for what purpose.For these reasons, a recent research study has called for a more systematic archiving and improved accessibility of (written) production documentation, necessary to keep a record of production processes and the business history of public broadcasters in the Netherlands (Hagedoorn, 2016, p. 31).Academic television research as well as producers and documentalists of (historical) television programmes would greatly benefit from this.This research study has also questioned how the success of narrowcasting and contextualisation practices for smaller and fragmented niche audiences is measured by television institutions, especially in the case of specialised audiences that value deepening one's knowledge and linear television viewing.In the contemporary convergence era, where content is dispersed across numerous platforms and television resembles a dynamic and hybrid repertoire, this is even more complex to evaluate (Hagedoorn, 2016, p. 105).This brings new challenges for programmes that re-use large amounts of audio-visual archival materials-such as Changing Times and After the Liberation, discussed further belowincluding accompanying rights issues for circulation on on-demand channels, financial compensation and other limits to material circulation online.
The strategic plans of NPO are based on a particular future vision of media production contexts and subsequently, a specific type of anticipated media use.Based on the new challenges for programmes that re-use large amounts of audio-visual archival materialsaffecting the production, access and online presentation of contextual materials like websites and supplementary content as outlined above-we argue that the re-use of archival material and its connected rights issues does not seem to anticipate that future.Then, what is the impact of greater accessibility of audio-visual archival materials and changes in collection policies?What is the discourse of the Dutch national audio-visual archive in these new and converging contexts, particularly regarding the archive's role and function as a content provider?

The Discourse of the National Audio-Visual Archive
The creation of television archives has always been a national issue, as shown by comparisons of the archives of Sound and Vision, the British Film Institute (BFI), and the French Institut National de l'Audiovisual (INA) show (Bryant, 2010, pp. 61-62).The organisation of (public) broadcasting and legislative regulations define the function and position of an archive.From 1958 onwards, the Dutch broadcast and facilitating organisation NTS archived film material and incidentally made tele-recordings of live broadcasts.Media historians urged the government in the 1980s to improve archiving of audio-visual heritage.During the 1990s, the audio-visual archives in the Netherlands were transformed.A study commissioned by the government (Vonhoff, 1995) resulted in a merger of three audiovisual archives and the national broadcast museum in 1997.Whilst the archives all had different objectives for preservation, the broadcast archive's main focus was re-use for professionals.In an international con-text, Sound and Vision is characterized by its mix of sources beyond the preservation of television programming.
Sound and Vision is both the company archive for the public broadcasters in the Netherlands as well as a cultural heritage institution.Similar to the medium of television, it is a nationally organised institution with a focus on national cultural production. 1 Most of the collection is considered cultural heritage.The re-use of audio-visual materials is still important, and the infrastructure offers professionals online accessibility for viewing, rights management and downloading.In 2015 approximately 125,000 downloads were counted, of which 78,000 from public broadcasters.Most of the material used was 'born digital', which means that it was produced after 2006.Increasing accessibility to archival materials in combination with the opportunities offered by online and digital platforms means that television creators are not only re-using archival material in television programmes. 2 The largest part of re-used materials are current and recent productions.The older the archival footage is, the less it is re-used.
With the introduction of a third public channel and commercial stations, the broadcast schedule increased.Subsequently, the number of programmes on Dutch television increased and the practice of archiving professionalised.Increasing accessibility also would suggest that more television programmes are using archival material.News programmes and current affairs have been traditional users of the broadcast archive, demanding quick delivery of clips.Few studies offer specific information about early re-use.An exception is Chris Vos' research on the representation of the Nazi occupation in the Netherlands.Vos calculated that in the period 1951-1990 about 3500 documentaries were produced for Dutch television, of which 893 were about Dutch history (Vos, 1995, p. 33) (Snickars, 2012, p. 30).This points out the expectations of audiences about the availability of content in general and public content in particular.However, using archival materials legally for audiovisual stories is still the domain of the professional.In  Such developments do not at all signal the 'end of' linear forms of storytelling via television, but rather such forms of storytelling are opened up by the access to digitalised archival collections and are further expanded through interactive experiences for users.A specific case study in the context outlined above is After the Liberation, a particular example of enriching archivebased programming through cross-media practices.

Case Studies: After the Liberation XL and the Archive in the Apparatus
In 2014, public service broadcaster NTR created a sevenpart television series about the first five years after World War II in the Netherlands, After the Liberation.The series paints a pervasive picture about this lesser known period in Dutch history, in which the recently liberated nation slowly began to recover from the chaos of war.Sound and Vision cooperated with NTR to provide a tablet-first site to expand and enrich the television series in an online context.Each episode is accompanied by an online 'XL' edition (http://www.nadebevrijding.nl).This interactive version (see Figures 2 and 3) lets visitors browse through the original archival sources by providing full access to the films, soundtracks, photos and newspaper articles used in the series, as well as source annotation-thus creating more direct connections between different archival sources and enabling the viewer to browse interactively through the different layers of the site.Traditional viewing is still dominant: between 600,000 and 850,000 viewers for an episode.In the same period, the website had about 50,000 page views of 28,000 users.Between the last episode in March 2014 and 1 January 2015, there were another 10,000 visitors with 19,000 page views.
After the Liberation XL is an example of expanding a television programme online, by offering several 'media layers' within one frame.The screen shows the episode, and while watching the programme on the left side of the screen (at specific timed intervals) information about the archival clip appears within the frame.On a time line below, decorated as a filmstrip, the original archival clips can selected and watched in their entirety.All the archival sources in After the Liberation XL were added manually, based on the research logs of the NTR editors.Sound and Vision was responsible for the technical development of the site, for which it cooperated with an external technical company, Videodock.The web editors of the online history site by NTR/VPRO broadcasters (http://www.npogeschiedenis.nl)selected and edited the materials on the website.
Besides contextualising and enriching After the Liberation, a second goal of the project was to explore the technical possibilities for Sound and Vision to develop other interactive publications.However, neither the broadcasters nor the archive has produced similar channels since.Although copyright issues and traditional production methods do limit the enthusiasm to create television programmes with an online component, the main conclusion in this project was that in order to scale the process of enriching programmes or larger parts of the archive with related sources, all elements in the enrichment chain would need to become automated.For production the budgets are cut, but online enrichment is too labour-intensive (Baltussen et al., 2014b).Subsequently, the digital collection resembles what William Uricchio (2010, p. 37) has described as the art of selection changing into art of aggregation: broadcast and cable eras) to the art of aggregation, and the far more active reassembly of sequence.And if we complicate this by factoring in the increasing importance of cross-platform prowling, the possibilities are daunting.'Therefore, documentalists and media researchers es-pecially need to remain critical of the motivations behind the aggregation of digitalised, beyond mere striving for all-inclusiveness.On the other hand, we can also observe changes regarding how the role of the user, for instance the researcher-as-producer, is envisioned and transformed-and to what extent the archive is or can be 'open' to such developments.In this context, Sound and Vision is involved in research projects like LinkedTV and AXES that develop tools for contextualization and improve access to audio-visual collections as the 'big data' they have become.However, the question rises whether broadcasters pay similar attention to online presentation and online access as to the production of linear programmes.Although the NPO policy does suggest broadcasters should do so, it does not actually describe an innovation priority and seems to struggle with the specificity of genres and relation to commercial parties involved in the media.
Moreover, what will be the effect of the space that external production companies will have in the new broadcast channels?As there is no 100% budget for productions, broadcasters need to agree on the online access to the programmes.
Questioning the extent in which broadcasters pay attention to online presentation and online access is particularly an issue for archive-based programmes.For example, for Zomergasten [Summer Guests] (VPRO, 1988-…), a three hour-long interview programme in which a public person successful in his or her profession-scientists, actors, authors, politicians-selects and presents his or her favourite television evening based on previously broadcast and clips from the past (see Figure 4).The programme consists of showing clips of 5 to 10 minutes and subsequently interviewing the person about their choice for the specific clip.As a live broadcast, it is a very particular example of the 'ephemeral' character of television online: due to the copyrights of the archival clips that are shown, the public can only review the programme online for a short period of two weeks.Furthermore, the amount of research time and juridical restrictions make it a complex production.One could argue that this programme cannot be developed within the current policy due to its lack of online accessibility.Yet, it is a highly acclaimed programme that has been broadcast since 1988.Summer Guests also experimented with an app offering extra information or clips on a second screen in 2011 and 2012 (http://www.vpro.nl/zomergasten.html).With only a small audience of less than 1% of its total viewers (Van Teefelen, 2012), the experiment stopped in 2013 and since then Summer Guests has mainly delivered additional information through Twitter as a 'second screen'.
Television creators nowadays produce more content than 'just' TV, and such cross-media practices offer important opportunities for contextualisation and in-depth knowledge gathering.In the context of preservation, however, research by Lotte Belice Baltussen et al. (2014ain Hagedoorn, 2016, p. 153) has pointed towards the complexity of archiving websites with television programmes of the Dutch public broadcaster.There is a large variety of web archiving projects on an international scale, but few of those projects focus on websites of broadcasters.Due to their dynamic and audio-visual content, websites of television programmes are particularly troublesome to archive, and funds for web archiving are often lacking.(Wagenaar, 1995).Source: Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.
Here, the 'Droste-effect of archiving' also comes into play.Generally speaking, the 'Droste-effect' (the name is derived from a picture appearing within itself on the tins of Dutch cocoa powder brand Droste) refers to the effect of a mise en abyme, or an image appearing within itself.We use the notion 'Droste-effect of archiving' to problematize the increasing amounts of original material already being preserved in the archive, which in turn are re-used, re-contextualised and archived in television broadcasts, and in addition are made available online, usually in again a different re-contextualisationforming a multi-platform and hybrid 'repertoire' of memory (see also Hagedoorn, 2013).This includes new forms of the re-screening of previously broadcast materials in online and on-demand contexts-for example, The Wonder Years (ABC, 1988(ABC, -1993) ) being repeated and reviewed via the on-demand streaming service Netflix, but with many of the originally included songs being replaced due to licencing issues.
This 'Droste-effect of archiving' is of course also possible with traditional media.For instance, Rudolf Breslauer's Westerbork film, filmed in Spring 1944, is without a doubt an iconic document.An analysis of the productions in the Dutch national archive shows that shots from this film are commonly used in television programmes about the occupation and the Holocaust.The origin of this document, shot by a Jewish prisoner in command of the camp commander, makes it unique.However, little is known about the filming itself.A copy of the document was first in Drenthe, then subsequently at the Instituut voor Oorlogs-, Holocaust-en Genocidestudies (NIOD) [Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies], then at the Filmmuseum in Amsterdam and eventually at the Netherlands Government Information Service (RVD).In the meantime, many Dutch television programmes that have reused this particular film have been archived.In 1955, a fragment of the film showing the transport from Westerbork is for instance used in the classic documentary Nuit et Brouillard [Night and Fog] by the French filmmaker Alain Resnais.The image of the young girl Settela Steinbach, looking through a crevice of the car door into the camera, has become an iconic image around the world for the persecution of Jews (see Figure 5).However, documentation on international (re-)use is not easily available in the archive.
Such examples already point to the relevance of preserving production documentation.Production documents not only help the study of the productions themselves, but may also give insight into what is stored and in what way.Another short example to further illustrate this point is the Changing Times episode 'Breaking News: Kennedy Assassinated!' from 17 November 2013.This episode was produced around a unique telex message about the breaking news of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy Jr.However, the actual television broadcast on the evening of November 22, 1963 had not been preserved.Whilst archive did have some film items of the international news exchange, in what way these were transmitted was also unclear.Even so, by means of preservation of the log, it eventually was made clear what had been broadcast on television that particular evening.
These dynamics all raise further questions regarding selection and interpretation: what should an archive choose to preserve, and on what criteria should such a selection be based on-ranging from quality to online migration of content.Furthermore, are archives preserving their own materials presented on the web?Subsequently, these new layers of information online as well as responses by audiences on the web are a challenge for audio-visual archives preserving broadcast materials.John Mackenzie Owen (2005) argues that preservation should also imply the dynamic patterns of use.Within the audio-visual domain, this is reflected in the previous research examples that focus on connections or links between data.A shift towards a preservation strategy on the digital fabric of society has only gradually started (De Leeuw, 2011, p. 16).Since 2013, Sound and Vision is archiving broadcasters' websites, programme websites and forums to add context to the archived television programmes.Lynn Spigel argues that the television archive is not only a documentation of what was broadcast, but also an interpretation and a classification (in De Leeuw, 2011, p. 16).Therefore, the archive is considered an apparatus within a discourse of audio-visual production and distribution.
In the convergent media landscape, Sound and Vision is looking to expand its preservation strategy from a focus on linear broadcasts and film productions, to include online presentations and interactive produc-tions such as games (Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid, 2015).Within the apparatus, the archive has become a player in co-production, connecting broadcasters and online developers, developing tools together with academic researchers to make sense of the data within its collections.It is relevant to encourage research on the archive as a construction in the media network (see also De Leeuw, 2011, pp. 19-20), since broadcasters and institutions clearly struggle with production, use and access of audio-visual programmes.

The Necessity of Systematic Archiving of Production and Contextual Documentation
Based on these observations, we argue that a more systematic archiving of production and contextual documentation is a necessity, especially for television studies research and the preservation of cultural heritage in the Netherlands.Research into primary sources is an important pillar of academic television research.Such research contributes to the understanding of the central role that television plays in modern society as a window on the world and as a source of social and historical information.Primary written sources, such as documentation of substantive research, director's notes and minutes, are valuable knowledge documents because they have been produced in a specific historical context during the original production.
Sound and Vision provides collections, but production documents of the Dutch public broadcasters are not archived in a systematic manner.The collection of paper and objects has been acquired through offers from individuals or companies clearing their cellars or desks.Contemporary changes of working processes in broadcast production, for instance the digital communication of editors and researchers, point to the necessity to undertake action and acquire documentation actively.In Figure 6, we give an overview of relevant examples of production documents, drawing upon a fruitful distinction made in production studies between internal, semi-internal and publicly accessible materials and activities (see Caldwell, 2009).A systematic improvement of accessibility and archiving of such electronic and paper production documentation is necessary to understand and interpret production processes and business histories of public broadcasters in the Netherlands.Academic researchers, television makers and documentarists of (historical) television programmes would benefit from this, and for several reasons that we outline below.First, television plays an important role in today's society as a memory practice (Hagedoorn, 2016), not only through the production and through transmission of information about the past via history programmes, but also by making materials from audio-visual archives available across several platforms for a general audience.Therefore, production documentation is essential for a richer picture of the realization of these productions and understanding the original (historical) context of audio-visual archival materials.Production documentation can elucidate and preserve the contexts in which this material has been given a particular interpretation.
Second, reporting of the historical and practical context of television production makes it possible to reflect on what kinds of stories about the past were considered relevant for a mass audience in a given period, and how this knowledge has been introduced and deployed in society.Reflection on the past is a necessary part of how a culture is shaped and developed: individuals use knowledge of history to further develop societies and to innovate through the handing down of ideas, customs and (political) policy.Analysing the use of the past through documentation of this practice may therefore provide insight into both the social issues that engaged people at the time as well as the impact of television on (national) cultural memory and how this has changed over time.
Third, production documents clarify how academic studies and theories are applied in practice in audiovisual productions, particularly historical television and radio programmes and their connected cross-media practices like programme websites, and therefore help us to understand how scientific research is translated into audio-visual productions.The archiving of production documentation for historical television programs is particularly urgent in the current media landscape.Television is increasingly digitised and converging with other media.This not only offers new forms of participation for users, but also brings more diverse, complex and dispersed processes for programme makers.
Furthermore, an active reflection on these production processes based on company history (both on a broadcast level and at a programme level) can contribute to transparency and more effective organizational structures.In addition, documents describing the reception and public participation can provide interpretation on the effectiveness and impact of historical television programs.This constitutes an important addition to the knowledge of production processes, which producers of history programs can draw upon to develop and optimize their productions.The archiving of production documentation for historical television programs also plays a role in the tightening contacts between broadcasters, editors and documentalists.The fact that an editor already describes programmes generates less labour-intensive work for documentalists-specialists or media managers who do not only document audiovisual materials in the archives, but also assist researchers in their search for information and materials.For re-use, again logs are essential.Finally, on a policy level, questions are asked regarding the function and form of Dutch Public Broadcasting now and in the future.
Academic analysis of primary source materials gives further insight into reasons, developments and decision-making and (multi-platform) television productions as well as the influence of boundary conditions and (political) policy.Such analyses are important in order to understand these changes and to possibly steer them.Research into production and the impact of historical television programs can also give direction to future policy in the field of education, culture and science.Despite the fact that production documentation is an important source for scientific research, the relevance and archiving of these long been neglected.Production documentation is worth preserving for academics, programmers and documentalists of historical television programs.The systematic archiving production documents is not only now but also for the future of value to understand how knowledge about the past in society is used and is subject to production and policy decisions.In this way, the analysis of this primary source materials may contribute to the enrichment of the knowledge that plays a role in the production of historical and archive-based television programs, which contribute to lasting forms of education, partnerships and reflections that develop and shape modern societies.

The End of the Archive as We Know It?
Regarding the changing role of the national archive as an agent of historical knowledge through the re-use and (re-)contextualisation of archival footage in the digital era, there are first of all new opportunities to be seized and new types of questions that can be asked by archives, broadcasters and academic researchers.The increased access and more direct availably of high quality material promotes engagement with cultural memory and is an important precondition to encourage the (re-)use of television archives and audio-visual heritage.This includes metadata and contextualization-by whom, why, how…-without which material loses its value for research.The development of digital search tools facilitates new types of questions that can be asked by academic researchers, especially via tools for visualization and comparison.An example of such a tool is for instance AVResearcherXL.This tool is aimed at allowing media researchers to explore large amounts of metadata of audio-visual broadcasts based on traditional catalogue descriptions, spoken content (subtitles) and social chatter (tweets associated with broadcasts).This enables researchers to both compare collections and contrast results for different content across time (see Huurnink et al., 2013, p. 1;Van Gorp, De Leeuw, Van Wees, & Huurnink, 2015).Such tools offer opportunities to more easily identify social and cultural trends over a longer period, generating new research questions in the process.For example, what if Chris Vos would carry out his previously mentioned research on the representation of the Nazi occupation in Dutch documentaries today?In the digital era, multimedia perspectives-cross-media practices, as well as searching and linking of various data sets-are par for the course and television broadcasters create more content than 'just' TV.We have therefore also raised questions what should an archive choose to archive in the digital convergence era, and on what criteria should their selections and interpretations be based.
In the digital era, there are second of all also new challenges through the production and contextualisation of archive-based programmes, and new questions that should be asked by archives, broadcasters and academic researchers.Television's role as a cultural medium has changed and developed over time-as for instance demonstrated by the gradual shift from broadcasting for mass audiences (including watching television at a fixed time in the nation's classrooms) to narrowcasting for more fragmented users.Many programmes produced in the broadcast era are not available for re-use or re-watching due to copyright issues.When research has not been recorded, permission also needs to be re-arranged.An example of such a programme from the broadcast era is Weimar: Opkomst en Ondergang van een Republiek [Weimar: The Rise and Fall of the Republic], a German production that aired in 1978 in an adaptation by Dutch broadcaster VPRO.WDR does not give its consent for the programme's circulation because it is unknown what archive material has been used.Most of the materials were created around 1918-1924 and are probably public domain.We are in this context not so much witnessing the end of television, but rather the end of a television programme as a limited engagement or experience-one of the fundamental characteristics of television programming.New forms of storytelling, and interactions between storytelling and access to audio-visual archival material fits into the context of what we call the medium of television.
This tension is also felt in government policy.On the one hand, policies are based on existing organizations, programming of public television and public values, but on the other hand, a focus on innovation, online availability, new production methods, and sharing airtime with new parties is being advocated.We have observed a development towards the end of public service broadcasting as the specific institution that originated from the early 1950s, particularly its ideology towards how television is organised-rather than 'the end of television' in the Dutch televisual land-scape.The strategic plans of NPO are based on a specific future type of media production context and media use.Due to new challenges for programmes that re-use audio-visual archival materials, and affecting the production, access and online presentation of contextual materials like websites and supplementary content, the re-use of archival material and its connected rights issues does not seem to anticipate the future type of media production context and media use that the strategic plans of NPO are based on.Programmes that re-use large amounts of audio-visual archival footage are problematic to develop within the current policy due to their lack of online accessibility.It seems that both archivists as well as media policy makers are still figuring out how the media world has adapted in the convergence era.
Based on these observations, we have argued for a more systematic archiving of production and contextual documentation to understand and interpret production processes and business histories of public broadcasters in the Netherlands-and to be able to more fully understand the role of the archive in terms of selection and interpretation over a longer period.Such a preservation strategy would need to include both online (web archiving) as well as printed and digital production documentation for a complete memory of production processes in a particular historical context.Furthermore, a more systematic approach to preservation is of an even higher necessity in the convergence era, in the first place due to contemporary changes of working processes in broadcast production, such as digital communication between editors and researchers, but also because practices of cross-media and transmedia storytelling (such as a television programme web site with contextual information, ranging from audio, video and photo, text) are not only highly susceptible to change but also more complex and difficult to archive.In addition, regarding the impact of the greater accessibility of audio-visual archival materials and changes in collection policies, copyright issues and traditional production methods limit the enthusiasm to create television programmes with an online component, but mostly elements in the enrichment chain need to become automated: to reiterate Uricchio (2010), the art of selection is changing into art of aggregation.Subsequently, it is important for media researchers to show awareness of an archive's history when using an archive's resources in their own research.Key questions to reflect on are: how open can or should the archive be?What are the archive's selection criteria for particular types of materials (for instance, at Sound and Vision the selection is based on programme types rather than themes)?Are there institutional problematics?What is the role of changing licencing models?What are the right questions to ask to find particular materials, and perhaps more importantly, to whom?What particular types of history and audio-visual sources are classified by the archive as valuable, which are not, and why?
In our discussion, we have reflected on different factors that interact in policy, production and consumption.A more thorough study of the commencement of television using both contextual sources and the programmes that have recently been digitised will enable researchers to better connect to recent developments on the levels of institutionalization, technology, reception, politics and policy.These new challenges also prompt new questions that need to be asked by researchers, broadcasters and archivists.These questions range from the politics of archiving, from how to select and interpret, to under what circumstances and conditions audio-visual material is made available, but also how to search and find.After all, audio-visual archival materials represent a specific construction and selection of our reality, and their availability in an image database or multiplatform repertoire is once more a selection by curators working in public service broadcasting and in the archive.In the digital age, even more people are part of this process of selection and aggregation, affecting how we remember the past through audio-visual images.
the digital era, especially for entertainment or infotainment programmes, a quick search by editors can rapidly create programmes which thematically construct a storyline around clips from television's pastretro television, countdown television or what Amy Holdsworth (2007) has described as 'list TV', programmes which recycle archival material composed into countdowns and framed by nostalgic commentary of celebrities or cultural commentators.According to De Leeuw (2011, p. 15), the recycling of television material can be considered as an articulation of a medium in transition.It feeds what can be called the nostalgia industry, repeatedly offering content from the past to revoke memories and keep them alive.However, archive-based history and documentary programmes such as the previously mentioned Changing Times 3 are quality programmes, for which (image) researchers require research time in the archive.Programmes that need research time to create a story are almost all created by public broadcasters.Limitations in copyright mean that only a small percentage of the collection is available online, about 1500 hours and mostly non-broadcast film collections.However, the archive does offer the opportunity to a general audience to participate with open access content via the use of YouTube, the Sound and Vision website (http://in.beeldengeluid.nl)and the platform Open Images (http://www.openbeelden.nl/.en).With its online material, Sound and Vision has reached more than 12 million page views.A recent agreement with the Dutch public broadcasters will offer the opportunity to distribute the 'out-of-commerce' programmes by public broadcasters online within the next few years.The archive has also been involved in innovative projects in cooperation with broadcasters.This includes non-television projects like the T-visionarium at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in 2009 (see Figure1).The audience could navigate interactively in a 3D space through an audio-visual collection of archive material in this installation.It was part of a cross-media project called De Eeuw van de Stad [The Century of the City] by broadcaster VPRO and the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (http://eeuwvandestad.nl/archives/7403).

Figure 4 .
Figure 4. Screenshot from Summer Guests, episode from 2013 with presenter Wilfried de Jong and guest Beatrice de Graaf.Source: Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.

Figure 5 .
Figure 5.The iconic image of Settela Steinbach from Breslauer's Westerbork film.Her name was only discovered in 1994 after thorough research by a journalist and historians of Herinneringscentrum Kamp Westerbork(Wagenaar, 1995).Source: Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.

Figure 6 .
Figure 6.Examples of production documents for archive-based history programmes: internal, semi-internal and publicly accessible texts and activities.
The new building of Sound and Vision opened in 2006-it is a public space as well as a living archive in which the Dutch public broadcasts are preserved.The museum that opened in 2006 was the most prominent way for public presentation of the archive.Over 10,000 hours of material could be watched in a curated way in the Sound and Vision Media Experience.
. Many of these programmes used archival material.With the advent of YouTube in 2005-2006, an ar-1 location of the university or school.In 2002-2004, one of the first was Davideon.nl,initiated by the University of Amsterdam (UvA), the University of Groningen (RUG) and Windesheim.The current system, Academia, will be transformed in 2016 into an open model.chival database model of online media emerged.This model has gradually developed into a global media phenomena and is arguably unparalleled in media history