Who's behind the news?
Who's behind the news?
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Newsjunkie.net is a resource guide for journalists. We show who's behind the news, and provide tools to help navigate the modern business of information.
Use of Data
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Rai Teche is the archival division of RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana), Italy's national public broadcasting company. It is responsible for the preservation, digitization, restoration, and dissemination of RAI's historical audiovisual heritage spanning both television and radio production from 1924 to the present. Recognized as Italy's largest cultural repository, Rai Teche has been inscribed in the Italian section of UNESCO's Memory of the World register.
RAI began radio broadcasting in 1924 and launched television in 1954. For much of its early history, archival management was fragmented across departments. In the 1970s, RAI's Dipartimento Scuola Educazione (DSE), established in 1975, initiated regional media libraries to distribute audio and video materials to schools. In the 1990s, RAI shifted to systematic preservation of all broadcast content, replacing selective archiving with comprehensive conservation across television, radio, photography, scripts, and publications.
This culminated in the formal establishment of Rai Teche in 1995 under the name Teche e servizi tematici/educativi RAI. In 1999, separate legacy databases were merged into a unified Multimedia Catalogue (Catalogo Multimediale), and a selection of historical material was made available online. Barbara Scaramucci was appointed director in December 1996 and oversaw significant early cataloguing efforts. In February 2014, RAI's board authorized high-quality digitization of the historical film archives.
Rai Teche catalogues, restores, and documents over 2.8 million hours of audiovisual content. This includes approximately 1.3 million hours of television footage from RAI's national networks since 1999, with historical selections dating to 1954, and 1.5 million hours of radio material from 1994 onward with selections from 1924. The Multimedia Catalogue contains approximately 75 million indexed documents encompassing television, radio, photography, scripts, and the Radiocorriere magazine archive. Additional holdings include approximately 340,000 films totaling some 28,000 hours, with the oldest material dating to the 1950s — largely newsreel footage and documentaries on 16mm and 35mm film.
The archive includes the complete run of Radiocorriere (90 years of Italy's equivalent to the Radio Times), news broadcasts, documentaries, and political coverage documenting Italian public life across the twentieth century. The archive also holds the RAI music library at the Auditorium Arturo Toscanini in Turin, containing rare autographed manuscripts, opera librettos, and concert programmes from the 1950s to the present. The archive contributed substantially to the 2014 exhibition commemorating 90 years of RAI broadcasting.
The full Multimedia Catalogue is accessible to the public at the library at Via Teulada 66 in Rome and at the Bibliomediateca Rai in Turin. External terminals are also available at the Mediateca Braidense in Milan, Rome's Discoteca di Stato, the library of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, and since 2018 at the Biblioteca Universitaria di Pavia. Non-profit users including students and researchers may request materials by contacting Rai Teche customer service in Rome. Rai Teche's public website offers programme chronologies, historical clips, and information on access procedures.