In recent years, the Netherlands Film Museum and the film and photo archive of the Netherlands Government Information Service have agreed upon a division of responsibilities in their acquisition policy, the museum concentrating on film as artistic document, the archive on film as a documentary source for the history of the country. Parallel to those developments at policy level, cooperation in technical matters such as cataloging, thesaurus construction and maintenance, and information about conservation activities is in the process of developing among the major Dutch archives. One major aspect of archive and museum policy is the selection of photographs and films that are to be safeguarded, as it is quite obvious that the total amount of audiovisual documents produced cannot be maintained for posterity. The Audiovisual Archive formulated for its own use a set of such selection criteria concerning the content as well as the technical and legal considerations to be weighed when deciding whether or not a document may be accepted into the permanent historical collections of the central archive of the government.