Democratising REsearch and restoration of Audiovisual Media and Film (DREAM-Film): practices and methods to improve the accessibility to restoration and promote competency exchange.

Today, only a small part of the analogue audiovisual collections has been digitised, and workflows and digitisation practices are carried out mainly in institutional centres at a national level. This situation leads to the question: Is online audiovisual content truly representative of European (and global) film history?The DREAM-Film (Democratising REsearch and restoration of Audiovisual Media and Film) project aims to develop alternative approaches to film digitisation, restoration, and quality assessment based on the experience of well-established institutional archives and smaller non-institutional centres to make those actions more democratic and inclusive by reducing restoration costs in time and resources. As a result, more accessible and adaptable digitisation practices and restoration software will be generated, promoting research and knowledge-exchange with strategical dissemination and communication actions. The main strength of this project is the interdisciplinarity and the mutual knowledge exchange between archives and research centres of humanistic and scientific faculties. The network involving those centres will be a base for developing more suitable practices and education plans to make film restoration practices available in institutions based in underrepresented countries and smaller non-institutional archives.