The International Central Institute for Youth and Educational Television (IZI) is a documentation and research centre commissioned to promote quality in children’s, youth and educational television and media. The IZI documentation provides several information services (databases, special library) and a comprehensive audiovisual collection. Our target groups are TV producers, programme planers, researchers, educators, and information specialists. We are cooperating with national and international partners in order to guarantee a broad access our resources. These networks have enhanced the degree of popularity of the IZI documentation a lot and have changed its institutional role from an archival repository to an information centre.

The IZI documentation centre collects information of any kind that is related to the planning, the production, the reception and the effects of children, youth and educational media. Together with the video library of the Prix Jeunesse International, an international archive of quality children’s TV programming from the world’s leading festival for children’s TV, there is a wide diversity of resources for everybody who needs (audio-visual) material on these topics.

The IZI is a department of the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation in Munich, Germany, and was established in 1965. Partners of IZI documentation projects are e.g. UNESCO, IFLA, and several information and documentation centres worldwide. Being a non-profit institution with a cross-national mission and with limited resources collaborations are crucial. In my presentation I would like to share my experiences on these collaborative projects and the impact on the institutional self-image of a research and broadcasting archive.