Archiving of Audiovisual Heritage in the Great Britain: Historical Traditions and Modern Practice

The aim of the article is to investigate the history of the formation and current state of development of archiving of audiovisual heritage in Great Britain. The research methodology is based on a system of modern basic scientific pproaches (socio-cultural, systemic, interdisciplinary) and a set of general scientific methods – bibliographic, comparative-historical, retrospective, empirical (descriptive), critical, typological, of system analysis. The tendencies of the organization of British audiovisual archives, means and methods of formation of collectives and infrastructure are analyzed. The following methods were used: genetic, inductive, historical, comparative, as well as systematization, generalization, classifi cation. A special place in the study is occupied by the art history approach, within which, in particular, morphological analysis allowed to distinguish the genre-species structure of audiovisual heritage in individual centers of its storage. The scientifi c novelty of the study is that for the fi rst time the main reasons for the foundation and some historical stories of 4 key centers for audiovisual heritage in the UK are traced: the Imperial War Museum, the National Archive of the British Film Institute, the Moving Image Archive of the National Library of Scotland, the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales; and also revealed the composition of the documents concentrated there – an important component of world cultural heritage. The historical role of British archivists in the development of the theory and practice of audiovisual archiving is shown. The peculiarities of the British archival policy, focused (in pre-Internet times) primarily on the formation and preservation of audiovisual collections and its impact on the world practice of audiovisual archiving, are analyzed. Changes in the priorities of archives' activity in the context of digital transformation and integration into the digital media space are identified. Emphasis is placed on archival initiatives in the direction of providing and updating the information and source potential of audiovisual collections. The peculiarities of the British model of organization of archiving of audiovisual heritage and functional specifi cs of its separate subjects are revealed. It is concluded that in the future the main research interest should be focused on the formation of a network of regional audiovisual archives and modern strategies for audiovisual archiving with relevant practices.