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Michael Vielhaber, Editor Multimedia ORF Archive #82 Who benefits from the ORF archive? "Reminds me of my childhood and my beloved grandma," says a lady from St. Pölten, leaving this comment under the recipe for an original Viennese juice goulash from 1963. "Those were good times. I'm glad I was a child back then," writes a gentleman from Klagenfurt, commenting on a Petz family bedtime snack from the late 1980s.

Both messages can be found on Facebook as attachments to videos in the series "#ORFarchiv #dusted" on ORF's main channel. Two word messages out of thousands, and "thousands" actually refers exclusively to the two posts addressed. If all the comments and reactions to the many hundreds of archive videos that have been submitted since the first #ORFarchiv post in November 2015 were added up, we would now be in the seven-digit range. Feedback comes from all parts of our society. They cut across all age groups, states and genders.

We know this because Facebook offers so-called "Insights," by which we mean more in-depth information around those people who use our posts and their specific usage behavior. This tells us what our audience likes and dislikes. But also how long a video is used on average, whether the sound is turned up or not, at which point it is often interrupted and whether the content is more amusing or distressing. It has never been easier to get timely feedback on designed content. For people working in an archive, it is fundamentally rather unusual to receive hundreds and sometimes even thousands of individual feedbacks on curated content. Digital collaboration makes it possible for both sides to benefit. The designers are empowered to take a (more) needs-based perspective, and users can enjoy optimized, high-quality content wherever they are (digitally). The goal here is not to achieve the greatest possible arbitrariness, but also to recognize niche interests as potentials and to be able to make appropriate offers. In the best case, a post combines the most diverse interests and thus niches. In addition to insights into usage behavior, the digitization of the entire ORF archive, which is currently underway, is invaluable. As soon as audio-visual archive materials are brought from their analog state to a digital one, they are also available for image-based queries. With just a few research steps, content can thus be sifted through and treasures unearthed that would probably have remained hidden under analog working conditions.

Incidentally, the digital copy of the juice goulash post mentioned at the beginning of this article has only been available since 2017, and the one on the Petz family since 2019. Both pieces of content were discovered through digital sightings. In both cases, the previously available research options would simply have been insufficient or not purposeful.

The transformation from analog to digital represents a quantum leap for archives in particular, the magnitude of which cannot yet be estimated. However, the fact that digital brings us even closer to our audience is already a sensational added value.