Rai Teche

“Let’s free the television archives”: this was the slogan that concluded the world congress of the International federation of Television Archives in Turin on 2 October 2011.

The congress was one of the most significant commitments for Teche Rai during the year and recorded considerable success in terms of participation and appreciation by public opinion.

The congress launched a project for the creation of a portal for exchanging archive material among the different broadcasters and the commitment for an innovative formulation at European level on the matter of rights to use television products.

During 2011, the relationship with the Rai Storia channel, with which the Teche cooperate also at concept level, was consolidated, as was that with certain programmes belonging to Rai 3, the format of which is based on materials from the archives.

The users of the Teche’s Multimedia Catalogue (CMM) exceeded a total of 11,000.
The year’s main commitment was the creation, with the ICT unit, of the new version of the catalogue and of all the documentation applications, which will be in use during 2012.
The catalogue is implemented every year with the digital documentation of everything broadcast by the television channels, by the radio channels and by gradually recovering past material: on 31 December 2011 a total of 2,272,000 hours were available for consultation in the catalogue.

Thanks to the CMM’s complex and advanced technologies, it is possible to view or listen to the archived material from any corporate workstation.

Besides the documentation of the programmes broadcast every day by the three general-interest networks and the radio channels, the recovery of material from the past is also taking place in the regional offices. This includes rough material from the TGR and Tg2, in view of the digitalisation of the programmes’ production process.
The national recovery of past material however has now partly diminished, due mainly to technical reasons.

The activity of the Rights Archive is increasingly intense, particularly due to the new digital production, with a considerable rise in the number of certifications required, not only by DTT channels, but also by the new Replay TV, available on the web, which, since 2011 has also relaunched some themebased channels, such as Rai 5.

The number of hours of material released to third parties for institutional reasons (schools, universities, local authorities, national institutions, nonprofit associations, museums, etc.) remains constant, and these can now be requested by computer through the Teche website (www.teche.rai.it).

The Teche’s main collaborations regarded big exhibitions and festivals set up for the 150th anniversary of the Unification of Italy, and included ‘Fare gli italiani’ in Turin, the exhibitions of the Vittoriano and the Quirinale in Rome, and the evenings of the Touring Club in Milan.

To commemorate the event, the Teche published a file put together by the Bibliomediateca (Book and Media Library) on the Risorgimento and Rai, and a collection of 100 radio documentaries in a multimedia product published by ERI. A boxed set of DVDs was also created summarising all the main events on the 150th anniversary broadcast by Rai.

Also for institutional purposes, several more documentaries were produced, including ‘L’arte italiana a Cuba’ (Silvana Palumbieri) screened during numerous festivals.
The Teche collaborated on two documentaries screened at the Venice Film Festival and set up a retrospective exhibition on Walter Chiari during the Roma Fiction festival.

ERI also published the book by Emanuele Gagliardi, researcher for the Teche, entitled
La maschera, which won the internal company competition ‘Narrerai’.