It comes as the public broadcaster moves to digitise the archives.
ABC’s Managing Director, David Anderson, has issued a statement regarding ABC Archives.
It reads:
ABC Archives is an asset of national importance and the ABC will always protect it.
The digitisation of ABC Archives is designed to protect our national heritage and make it more accessible for content makers and all Australians.
The ABC’s digitisation work undertaken in the past two years represents one of the largest projects in terms of scale and duration of its kind. It ensures the ABC’s highly valuable and sometimes fragile content is preserved for future generations. It also ensures this content is now more searchable than ever before.
Before undertaking this important project we engaged with similar organisations that have already completed or are in the process of preserving their legacy media collections, including the National Archives of Australia, the BBC and CBC.
Already approximately 90% of our audio and 35% of our cassette-format video tape content that is high value and high risk has been converted into digital files. We have also digitised all one-inch and Umatic tapes, so in total 60% of our videotape holdings is now available on digital formats.
By the end of this year 1.2 million documents, 637,000 images, 97,000 videotapes and 54,000 audio carriers will have been digitised.
The ABC has for several years been transitioning to a digital-first media organisation.
This week we announced to employees a proposal to make changes to the ABC Archives team. I can assure all Australians that the proposed changes would not in any way affect the quality of the Archives’ content, now or into the future.
The proposed changes to the management of the ABC Archives and news library would include introducing several new technological platforms to ensure accessibility.
We are confident the proposed changes would not compromise the Archives team’s ability to provide appropriate services to content makers. Following the proposed changes, the ABC’s archives and library services would employ around 70 people.
There would continue to be highly-skilled Archives staff based in newsrooms and assisting and supporting our content teams, and they would remain responsible for the archiving of raw material.
Safeguarding the ABC Archives, making it fully accessible and more easily usable are part of responsible stewardship of this wonderful resource.
