CUTV Archives

• About CUTV Archives
• Browsing the Collection
• Who is Involved?
• Project Goals
• CUTV Archives Take-down policy
• Contact

About CUTV Archives

Founded in 1966 as TV Sir George, CUTV has chronicled life at Concordia University and in Montreal for over five decades. “CUTV Archives” refers to over 1,000 videotapes which are now housed at Concordia’s Records Management and Archives (RMA) under “CUTV Fonds” (P0024). This fonds also includes a small amount of paper records and photographs. Between 2017 and 2019, a team at CUTV worked to digitize and publicize the video collection, a process continued in 2025 as a joint project between CUTV and RMA. The latest iteration of the project is focused on digitizing tapes before 1999, enhancing archival descriptions, and ensuring the long-term preservation of the videos.

The collection features:

• Student news and reporting
• Arts and music scene coverage
• Protest and activism documentation
• Diasporic community stories
• Student films and more

For more details about the fonds itself, please see the fonds-level description in Concordia’s Access to Memory catalogue.

Browsing the Collection

There are two main access points for the collection at the moment:

• Browse the CUTV Archives YouTube Channel
• Explore the archival catalogue for the CUTV Fonds

At time of writing, this is an ongoing project. We are still digitizing and uploading videos, as well as working to improve how they are sorted, tagged, and arranged.

Who is Involved?

This initiative is a collaboration between Concordia University Records Management and Archives (RMA) and CUTV. RMA houses the physical collection and ensures the long-term preservation of digitized videos through their digital preservation system. CUTV is tasked with coordinating the digitization process, writing and enhancing archival descriptions, and managing public access to the digitized tapes. RMA has also provided guidance and consulting throughout the project starting in July 2025.

This project is made possible through the Library and Archives Canada Documentary Heritage Communities Program, which funded the initiative from July 2025-July 2026. The next year of the project will be supported through the Young Canada Works – Building Careers in Heritage program.

We are working with a local digitization vendor, VideoMedia, for digitizing the tapes.

Team Members

• Tatiana Povoroznyuk, Video Archive Coordinator, July 2025-present
• Leila Salazar, Video Archive Assistant, July 2025-present
• Matthew Halpenny, Video Archive Assistant, June 2026-present

Project Goals

• Preservation
  • Videos in this collection are held on rapidly deteriorating magnetic tape. By transferring these videos onto digital formats, materials that may have been lost are now preserved. The project includes the ingest of digital files into RMA’s digital preservation system, meaning that the stability of digital files will be continuously monitored into the future.
• Accessibility
  • We want to share as many videos from the CUTV Archives publicly as possible, sharing decades of student life, activism, and local culture with new audiences. By putting these archives online, we hope everyone, students, artists, community members, and researchers, can watch, respond, and use this material in meaningful ways. Towards this goal, we are aiming to use accessible language in video descriptions, and are designing a classification system that will make the collection easier to navigate.
• Highlighting invisibilized histories
  • Our goal is to ensure that the wide range of experiences in Montreal, especially those of students, activists, and diasporic communities, are visible, valued, and remembered. We seek to put reparative description into practice, using the “scope and content” field to add respectful language and important cultural context where it is missing. If you encounter a description that is incorrect or can be expanded, please contact us.
• Adopting an ethics of care
  • Our team is aware of the potential harms digitization projects can enact, and we are aware that content in the archive may be difficult or use outdated/offensive language. We have developed a detailed selection policy to determine what videos will be publicly accessible, and a team member watches and describes the video entirely before it is published online, taking care to note any content warnings. Please see our take-down policy below if you would like to request the removal of content.
• Improving archival capacity at CUTV
  • The project includes documenting our policies and guidelines, ensuring decisions are transparent and the project can continue into the future if need be. We are also working to improve CUTV’s internal archival and digital record-keeping practices, ensuring transfers to RMA into the future.

Watch the introduction to our project explained by our team.

CUTV Archives Take-down Policy

The team working on CUTV Archives strives to responsibly provide online access to video content. In doing so, every effort is made to respect copyright status, the privacy rights of individuals, and to uphold access restrictions determined by donors or archivists. Despite these efforts, we know that content made available online may unintentionally violate intellectual property rights, privacy rights, disrespect cultural protocols or be considered insensitive, offensive, or harmful to certain individuals or communities. In such cases, individuals may submit a take-down request on the behalf of themselves or their communities.

To submit a take-down request, please email archive@cutvmontreal.org with your contact information, the unique identifier for the item (eg. P0024-09-0009) and/or a link to the content, and your reasoning for submitting the request. As your request is reviewed, we may contact you for further context and details. Depending on our assessment of the situation we may do any of the following:

• Amend the content description;
• Redact portions of the content and reupload the redacted content;
• Permanently remove the content from public online platforms;
• Removing any online references to the content including in finding aids and through search engines;
• Modify access restrictions to the content.

Please contact us with any questions or concerns about the take-down process.

Contact

Please contact us with any feedback or questions about the process: archive@cutvmontreal.org.