Shedding light on our audiovisual heritage: perspectives to emphasise CERN Digital Memory

This work aims to answer the question of how to add value to CERN’s audiovisual heritage available on CERN Document Server. In other terms, how to make more visible to the scientific community and grand public what is hidden and classified: namely CERN’s archives, and more precisely audiovisual ones because of their creative potential. Rather than focusing on its scientific and technical value, we will analyse its artistic and attractive power. In fact, we will see that all kind of archive can be intentionally or even accidentally artistic and exciting, that it is possible to change our vision of a photo, a sound or a film. This process of enhancement is a virtuous circle as it has an educational value and makes accessible scientific content that is normally out of range. However, the problem of how to magnify such archives remains. That is why we will try to learn from other digital memories in the world to see how they managed to highlight their own archives, in order to suggest new ways of enhancing audiovisual archives within CERN in a second part. This will be also an opportunity to rethink our opinions about what is useful, beautiful or not, what deserves to be shown to the whole world or not.