ABSTRACT
Uneven access to television archives across Europe has posed a number of problems for transnational and historical comparison. Developments in online technologies have promised new opportunities for creating access to television content at national and international levels, yet the potential for transnational comparison remains problematic. This chapter focuses on Video Active, a major European collaboration between broadcasters, archives, technologists and television scholars to create online access to television programming and to promote comparative approaches to television history, which ran between September 2006 and August 2009. The chapter will illustrate, however, a number of factors that can inhibit online access to television content, and it will show how classificatory schemes and metadata can influence the pre-selection, interpretation and comparison of accessible programming. It will go on to explore how the project developed practical solutions to some of these issues and will suggest that continued collaboration on a larger scale may yet hold the long-term answers to problems of access and interpretation.
