European Television History Online: History and Challenges

Increasingly television heritage is being digitized and made accessible to non- industry user, enabling ‘the archival turn’: the study of online archives so as to revisit the dominant discourses in television historiography. This article discusses both conceptual and practical perspectives on online television heritage within a broader European frame- work. It starts from the notion of connectivity, pointing to the development of the archive as a network of connections and continues to address the dynamics involved in the trans- formation of the television archive into an online presentation including the most relevant actors. With the help of examples from Dutch and European television heritage projects the article discusses how the new archive is capable of mediating between the past and present, between history and memory, between curatorial perspectives and popular uses. It concludes on the challenges that (European) online television heritage offers in the field of television historiography and theory.