Audiovisual documents such as films, radio and television programs, audio and video recordings are the most important testimonies of the 20th and 21st centuries. Audiovisual archives tell us stories about the lives of people and cultures from around the world. They represent an invaluable heritage that strengthens our collective memory and is a valuable source of knowledge, reflecting the cultural, social and linguistic diversity of our communities. They are, however, extremely fragile and more and more audiovisual testimonies will be lost in the near future. Much of the world's audiovisual heritage has already been irrevocably lost through neglect, destruction, decay, and lack of resources, skills, and structures.
October 27 has been declared World Audiovisual Heritage Day by UNESCO. Preserving this heritage and ensuring that it remains accessible to the public and future generations is an important goal for all memory institutions. World Audiovisual Heritage Day is an opportunity to raise general awareness of the need for urgent action and to recognize the importance of audiovisual documents.
The project TailoredMedia aims to create a user-centric ecosystem for journalism and archiving. This will leverage recent advances in automatic analysis of visual content using AI-based methods, thereby facilitating annotation, browsing and searching of assets.
TailoredMedia aims to make highly accessible sources that are essential for scholarly research but are still underutilized due to the poor quality of metadata.