2020 IASA - FIAT/IFTA Joint Conference

RAI has always focused on the educational and pedagogic goals of public broadcasting, thus producing children’s programmes of great quality. The programmes written and produced internally, especially from the ‘50s to the late ‘70s, are examples of top quality TV products, regarding the content (didactic, artistic, cultural) and the specific audiovisual storytelling methods employed. They were created and designed by well-known writers, artists, actors, musicians, but also directors, scenographers and illustrators of that time, and made to educate and divulge culture guaranteeing the appropriate language to reach the public and, at the same time, cultural quality.

Being sometimes considered “less interesting” because of the audience they address, children’s programmes have often been unnoticed. Nevertheless, they open up a multitude of research perspectives, ranging from social, pedagogical, educational, anthropological, and historical studies to analysis of the TV narratives and languages specifically conceived for the target audience and the media employed.

Our research starts from a general survey on RAI’s children programmes, now part of the digitisation and documentation workflow within the Rai Teche Multimedia Catalogue, aiming to bring those items and their qualities to light, to provide access to them and, where possible, to make them reusable.

The study opens up insights and debates on the ways and methods (platforms, metadata, access models) that could be worked out to make these programmes available and accessible to a public that may include not only the “usual” archive researchers but also some “tiny” or young users and the universe of people around them: teachers and parents as well as authors and directors, who could find ideas in the past to build new projects in the future.