Left to right:  Fikriye Berker, Aykut Eliş (both TRT), Vera Trpeska, Cane Petrushevski (both MKRTV)

Ankara - Two archiving specialists from MKRTV, the EBU's Member in FYR Macedonia, have visited Ankara to study how fellow Member TRT conserves and organizes its own archives.

Vera Trpeska and Cane Petrushevski of MKRTV, which has many valuable archives threatened with decay, learned at firsthand how TRT manages its workflows and uses metadata during the process of archive digitization.

The working trip to Ankara followed a visit to Skopje by Fikriye Berker, Chief Engineer in TRT's Archives Department. The initiative was funded through the EBU's Partnership Programme by the Open Society Institute.

Ms Berker says the two visitors witnessed the whole archive workflow of TRT and began working together on the topic of metadata. She plans to support her MKRTV counterparts in their film digitization project, and to follow their progress.

The twinning of archivists from TRT and MKRTV is the fourth mentoring scheme to have been organized by the EBU Partnership Programme.

Previous initiatives involved twinning an archivist at Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) with a mentor in Czech Television; mentoring in France on human resources management for the head of HR at GPB; and support at the EBU to a specialist from Armenian Radio for a content exchange project among youth radios.