Archivos Televisivos y Transparencia: Memoria y función documentalista en la obra de Paloma Hidalgo

Abstract

The documentary collections of television stations are essential resources in the shaping of the imaginary collective memory of the 20th and 21st centuries. The preservation of these archives has facilitated the expression of the identity of countries and cultures.

This recognition also implies a technological, maintenance and management challenge for documentalists who are intermediaries in the access of the heritage of audiovisual archives to the public.

In Paloma Hidalgo's professional, academic and manager career, the historical status acquired by the archives owned by television stations is permanently present because, despite being business archives, they take on this transcendental dimension by making it possible to study and recompose the transcendental events of the last few decades.

Through a bibliographical review of Paloma Hidalgo's publications and the viewing of her interventions in different forums dedicated to television, her perspective on the documentary function in the contribution to collective memory is recovered. This contribution is part of Hidalgo's reflection on the evolution of the profession in the context of digitisation. She concludes that documentalists are revalued in the new organisation resulting from multiplatform newsrooms by being placed at the centre of the production chain. This, however, entails weighing up the possibilities and limits of access to and dissemination of archive content; a process in which the challenge of the documentalist has to harmonise transparency with its limitations.