This course familiarises students with key archival theories and paradigms, concepts and academic debates. Different archival traditions will be discussed, and within them the aims, positions, functions, and power of institutions and counter-practices, including but not limited to audiovisual archives.

During this course, students become acquainted with and are invited to conceptualise technical, ecological, ethical, political, and historical issues regarding conservation and restoration of collections of film, broadcast materials, and media art in the light of historical and environmental sustainability.

This course focuses on institutional strategies and technological infrastructures for preserving and making accessible analogue and digital collections. Attention is paid to workflow, organisational frameworks, copyright, and metadata management, which attest to fundamental (theoretical) questions and competing ideologies and traditions.

Different definitions of programming and curating will be applied to examine presentation approaches, how programmers and curators select materials, draw relations between them and their social-historical contexts, and, by doing so, participate in processes of knowledge production and value creation.

In a four-week workshop hosted by our partners, students work in teams on a case study relevant to the institutions. This may involve aspects of preservation, cataloguing, restoration, digitisation, and presentation. Students present their resulting plans to an expert group.

In semester 2, dedicated to specialisation, electives enable students to combine interests, or to fuel the parallel thesis project. In addition to the programme's own elective "This is Film! Film Heritage in Practice", organised in cooporation with Eye Filmmusuem, about 100 electives are offered by the Graduate School of Humanties.

Students conduct research and write their thesis (17,000-23,000 words), supervised by a staff member, about a subject relevant to the programme, informed by previous courses. Academic skills are trained in an accompanying workshop, which also offers room for peer feedback.