The audiovisual archives of the Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation (ZNBC) represent one of Southern Africa’s most significant documentary heritage collections. They span film, audio, and video recordings from the colonial era, under the former Northern Rhodesia Broadcasting Service, through independence to the present day. The collection also stands among the few surviving audiovisual witnesses to Zambia’s pivotal role in regional liberation movements and its leadership within the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War.
Yet this recorded memory is fading. Environmental exposure, poor storage, and obsolete formats have brought the collection to the brink of irreversible loss—making timely restoration and digitization essential to preserving this legacy for future generations.
In cooperation with UNESCO, and with support from Japan, this project seeks to safeguard endangered documentary heritage through the restoration and digitization of ZNBC’s audiovisual archives.
Project Goals
Sort and assess ZNBC’s analog tape and film holdings, identifying and prioritizing deteriorating materials and establishing a clear framework for subsequent restoration.
Restore the most critically deteriorated tapes through targeted treatments, recover their structural integrity before further decay renders their content irretrievable.
Convert and digitize the restored materials into stable, widely supported digital formats using professional ingest equipment.
Catalogue and preserve access to the digitized collection by organizing and documenting it within a structured system, ensuring long-term discoverability for researchers, educators, broadcasters, and the global community.
Expected Impacts
Preserving Cultural Heritage: by converting analog tapes to digital formats to ensure the long-term preservation of valuable audio-visual content, preventing deterioration and loss over time.
Ensuring Technological Adaptability by using open, widely supported formats that keeps content compatible with future technologies, and ensuring lasting usability.
Broadening Access, Outreach, and Research, with digital formats broadening access and engagement, reaching wider audiences through online platforms, exhibitions, and educational programs, while well-catalogued materials give scholars, researchers, and educators rich repen our understanding of the past
This initiative is made possible thanks to generous support of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sport, Science and Technology of Japan (MEXT)
