About Malta Audio Visual Memories

Sharing history with the future

Our Objective

Malta Audio Visual Memories (MAVM) aims to preserve audiovisual material which is part of our country’s intangible national and cultural heritage. We want to offer a digital platform for future generations, tourists, and people interested in Malta’s history to explore this legacy.

Who we are

MAVM is a team of 25 people who are working on digitising over 24,000 hours of footage in the archives of Malta’s national broadcaster. We work in different roles, including:

  • Video ingestion
  • Video editing
  • Sound editing
  • Metadata inputting
  • Project management

What the project is all about

Public Broadcasting Services (PBS) Ltd has over 24,000 hours of physical footage dating, most of which dates back to the 1960s when television service was introduced in Malta. These tapes and reels offer a visual record of Malta’s history just before and after obtaining independence, including every important event that happened on the islands in the last six decades.

Since launching in May 2019, MAVM has been carrying out the digitisation process which will preserve this footage for posterity and use it to enhance travellers’ appreciation of the historical context of our country’s attractions. 

The process will categorise digitised clips extracted from the footage into four major areas: 

  • Culture
  • Events
  • Historical figures 
  • Locations

To share this material more widely, MAVM will install totem poles and plaques at several places in Malta and Gozo, which enable users to access related video clips by scanning a QR code.

Who is supporting us

MAVM is supported by a €4.8 million fund awarded to PBS Ltd through the European Regional Development Fund programme called Enhancing the Cultural Tourism Experience through Digitisation, as well as national funds. This project is in collaboration with Heritage Malta and the Malta Tourism Authority. 

We are currently in the second phase of the project, which PBS originally embarked on in 2014 under Priority Axis 5: “Protecting our environment—investing in natural and cultural assets”.

Where you can find us

We are based in the Archives department of PBS Ltd, which is located in the basement level of the PBS Creativity Hub in Gwardamanġa. The archives are only open to the public by appointment, so we encourage you to follow us on social media for updates.

Our team uploads newly digitised clips from the archives every week to the website and social media pages, where we request people to send us any information that might help us identify the people, events, and locations that appear in the videos.

You can get in touch with us by email on [email protected] and by following our pages on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.