ABC Commercial, the distribution and commercial arm of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, has agreed upon a deal with London- and Los Angeles–based video content agency LOLA Clips that will see the latter represent clip sales for the ABC’s stock video content archive.

The Sydney-headquartered pubcaster, which recently celebrated its 90th anniversary, boasts one of the world’s most extensive broadcast archives, drawn from decades of television and radio productions. The collection includes coverage of global and national events, and interviews with legendary pop icons as well as audio archives, transcripts and still photography that date back to 1932. According to LOLA Clips, there are also considerable amounts of undigitized offline material that needs to be researched.

“Our new agreement with LOLA Clips is an exciting opportunity for ABC Commercial to open up the ABC’s extraordinary archive collection to a whole new audience,” said Janine Chrichley, manager of library sales at ABC Commercial. “I am looking forward to working with the LOLA team to take our content to the international production community, in what promises to be a very fruitful partnership.”

“We’ve been working with Janine for a while, and the depth and breadth of the collection just keeps on amazing us,” added LOLA Clips co-founder Sandra Coelho. “Our job at LOLA is to get all our international clients to become aware of this collection and start to discover it in detail.”

The agreement comes in the wake of news that the ABC was undertaking organizational changes to its archive department, with the plan being to eliminate 58 jobs while introducing 30 new roles. According to a statement issued by the pubcaster, the move is being made as the ABC transitions into a “digital-first media organization” in order to “redesign the way we work to better support content makers as they serve changing audience needs.” In 2021, approximately 90% of the broadcaster’s audio and 35% of its videotape collection was converted into digital files.