In the penultimate paragraph of his column "Once upon a dream" last Sunday, Dr Guido Saliba dealt with archiving problems in local broadcasting and television stations, mentioning in particular DOI along with PBS, as if DOI were a broadcasting or television station. Needless to say, DOI is neither one nor the other.

For the record, DOI had its own video section which was closed down years ago. The footage is still kept by DOI, but there is an understanding between DOI and the National Archives that the material will be passed on to the latter so that a strategy is worked out to transfer the footage to DVD format.

I would also like to take this opportunity to state that subject to its technical constraints, the Department of Information has, from time to time, been taking initiatives aimed not only at preserving historical footage, but also at making it easily accessible to the public.

One such instance was the reproduction of 16 mm black and white footage featuring the funeral of Dun Gorg Preca in 1962, which was converted to VHS format and put on sale. Another instance concerns footage covering the 1964 independence celebrations and the 1974 Republic Day ceremony. These were digitally converted and put online on the DOI Website.

As your correspondent also expressed the hope that computerisation will solve the problem of lack of archival material, readers might be interested to know that four years ago, when DOI embraced digital photography, an image archiving system was set up and access to it is available on request.

Furthermore, several of the archived images, many of them covering historic occasions, are also available on the DOI Website. The same site also hosts audio and video recordings of contemporary national events. The resultant double advantage of this service is that while present-day Malta is being kept online, the archives of tomorrow are being secured.