Translations:Registratie en identificatie van video- en audiotapes bij Damaged Goods voor digitalisering/14/en

VIAA is an institution that was set up in late 2012 by the Flemish government. The goal of VIAA is to digitise heritage, to create sustainable digital archives and make them available for education, research and the wider public via public libraries. Today, VIAA does this in the first instance for the audiovisual heritage, but its task not limited to this. In practice, one of the things that this means is that VIAA coordinates large-scale digitisation projects of material from both the broadcasting and the cultural sectors, and also bears the costs of this. The resulting files are stored in its own digital depot. The content partners can manage and use their digitised material via an online system made available to them by VIAA. VIAA itself can make the material available (in a non-exclusive manner) for educational and research purposes, and in public libraries.

It is not possible for arts organisations to work directly with VIAA as a partner concerned with content, but VIAA does enter into partnerships with collection managing institutions. Because it is not in principle part of arts organisations’ mission to guarantee the sustainable accessibility of their audiovisual archive, VIAA prefers collaborations with arts organisations to take place via a collection managing institution, which then takes on the intermediary role, and also commits to preserving the digitised material in the long term. For the Damaged Goods archive, VTi is taking on this role. Also, VTi is not a collection managing institution like the museums, cultural archives or heritage libraries that operate within the cultural heritage sector, but one of its missions is to fulfil the role of documentation centre for the performing arts.