Less than 10% of Romanian state-owned television TVR’s archive is digitized, as those responsible for it lack the EUR 50 million needed for the project.

The television’s archive contains a total of 240,000 hours of footage, but under 10% of them are digitized, according to Irina Negraru, the coordinator in charge of TVR’s Media Archives and Documentation Service, quoted by local Mediafax.

TVR started scanning the Romanian Revolution collection because it contains some of the most important images owned by the Romanian Television. The project began on July 1, 2014 and is close to the end.

The Romanian Television was also part of a European digitizing project, namely euscreen.eu. This project has already digitized some 4,000 titles.

“The project started in 2008, and the trailers for large materials are available online on the portal euscreen.eu" said Irina Negraru.

TVR also joined the EUscreenXL, which will continue euscreen.eu‘s project. A total of 6,000 titles will be scanned under this project.

Moreover, materials from TVR’s archive were made available to European users on the online platform europeana.eu. “We also have 4,000-5,000 titles there,” said Negraru.

The television also wants to be close to the young audience and thus it created its YouTube channel.

However, representatives of TVR lack the necessary state funds to digitize the archive. According to Irina Negraru, there are no funds for this project, reports Mediafax.

“The funds necessary for digitization are very high. We don’t talk about EUR 1-2 million. We are talking about some EUR 50 million. Unfortunately, the Television can’t afford such an amount. It’s true that we’ve obtained some funds, and that’s how we’ve managed to digitize some 10% of the archive, with the help of external partners,” Negraru added.

Irina Popescu, irina.popescu@romania-insider.com