At the heart of the French audiovisual sector, Ina collects, safeguards, digitises, restores and distributes French television and radio archives – over 60 years of radio and 50 years of TV programmes. With 2,5 millions hours of radio and television in stock, and more than a million photos, Ina’s archives are among the world’s biggest. Serials, TV films, documentaries, news bulletins and programmes, sports, entertainment, interviews, radio plays, concerts… and, of course, Ina’s regional archives, constitute an exceptional resource for production, broadcasting, publishing, but also research and education.

First audiovisual archives center in the world
First digital image databanks in Europe

Ina collects over 300,000 hours of radio and television programmes a year

Ina has set up a policy for the digital capture of images and sounds, which has gradually enabled the storage of more and more archives.

Ina saves and digitises endangered programmes

Ina not only collects programmes, it also guarantees the physical preservation of this French audiovisual heritage. Many documents are unique and have inevitably been damaged with time.

In 1999, Ina launched a vast Safeguard and Digitisation Plan (PSN), which has already permited to save and digitise more than 250.000 hours of radio and television programmes. By 2015, all the endangered archives should be processed and saved from the danger of disappearing forever (835 000 hours are endangered). Total cost of this plan is 200 millions €.

Ina restores memory

The growing demand for good-quality images and the deterioration of older collection make it necessary to repair damaged films, videos and soundtracks. Ina’s teams use specially developed in-house software to restore over 500 hours every year.

Ina makes this memory available

  • professional access – digitisation and theme-based classification
    In addition to digitisation, Ina has undertaken a vast operation to classify its archives by theme to make them more easily available to audiovisual professionals in France and abroad. More than 150 theme-based collections are already available under the headings politics, history, society, culture, entertainment, sports, people.
    Since February 2004, Ina offers the professionals a service unique of its kind in the world on www.inamedia.com. Inamedia is the first digitised audiovisual archives databank of the world accessible on line. That is to say 250.000 hours of television archives and 2.000.000 documentary notes.
  • access for research – analysing and understanding audiovisual
    Inathèque de France’s consultation centre, based at garden level in the François Mitterrand Library in Paris, has a number of audiovisual reading stations available where researchers, teachers and students can consult the French radio and television legal deposit archives.
    Inathèque de France also organises workshops, conferences and monthly meetings devoted to the role played by the media in our society.
  • general public and institutional access – a memory to be shared Ina is developing a policy to promote the archives for educational and cultural purposes and to that end has set up many partnerships. Through a number of innovative projects, Ina is facilitating an “image education”and encouraging the circulation of this heritage in its most varied forms, at festivals, retrospectives, exhibitions and other cultural events.
    The general public has direct access to the archives on the web site www.ina.fr

A unique laboratory for image and sound research and experimentation

Preserving the national audiovisual heritage is the top priority of Ina’s research activities. Ina has become one of the international leaders in major projects to safeguard and protect images and sounds by developing the digital tools needed for restoration, indexing and marking the audiovisual documents.

Since February 2004, Ina is the manager of the european research project Presto Space, and participates also to the project Quaero.

Within this vast research lab, the Musical Research Group (GRM) is a unique place for research, creation and preservation in the fields of recorded sound and electro-acoustic music.

Ina is also a producer of creative documentaries and multimedia and the leading European audiovisual media and multimedia training centre.

In CASPAR, INA provides multimedia indexing and archiving modelling and knowledge representation. INA will provide structured contents for experiments with computerbased music and performing arts in the context of innovative and long-term access scenarios.

Contact: Yann Geslin
Phone: +33 1 56 40 31 23 / 40 29 88
Fax: +33 1 56 40 49 88
Website: http://www.ina.fr