FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2019

The story of the huge challenge of saving the IBA Radio & TV archives, following the closure of the public broadcaster in Israel on May 2017.
August 2014, the Israeli parliament voted on a new law, deciding to close IBA - the 80 years old public broadcaster, sending home all the employees and creating a new Public broadcaster in a new facility with new staff. An article in the new public broadcast law, stated that the IBA old archives would move to the new broadcaster. That was a result of me, sitting in endless meetings in the Knesset (Israeli parliament) making sure that the IBA archives will have a solid status and a broadcaster that would be responsible to finance, preserve and enable access to the historical IBA archives- 81 years of radio and 49 years of TV archives.
But the day IBA closed - May 2017 - I found my self with no employees and with the urge to evacuate the Archive facilities (in two cities) within 3 months to a remote warehouse. That could be the end of these glorious active archives. The new broadcaster already decided to buy archives from a commercial news company.
So I had a few challenges to cope with simultaneously: facing the new management, the finance ministry and the Knesset committee that was in charge of implementing the new law. Delay the evacuation of the archives for 18 months, finding a new location, getting back all the archive emloyees, quick establish of new work methods with the new broadcaster, so we could get back being a producing archive, going through a complicating process of packing the archive, barcoding all items and reestablished in the new modern well equipped building.
 Through all these 18 months, we managed to close the archive services only during four months before re- opening all archive services on one hand, and starting a digitization project of all collections on the other hand. It was a long-short, intensive miraculous journey of saving a national Audiovisual archive in times of uncertainty to many broadcasters.