SR's original idea was to use the culturally historically unique film material in different TV productions. The film material came to be thoroughly catalogued by SR's archivists under the management of Sahlberg. This was a job that took many years and cost a lot of money. Some of the catalogued items reveal that work was still being done at the end of the 1970s.

The catalogue was designed according to a classification system used by Swedish libraries, and in order to facilitate the use of the film material it became easy to search for proper names. Parts of the old films were included in a number of TV productions, for instance in film cuts by Sahlberg himself - (of which e.g. Letters from Stockholm - a film about the summer of 1909 is included in this web presentation) and also in film productions by Olle Häger and Hans Villius, well-known TV producers and historians. The card catalogue was in many ways very good. But it was also affected by the values of its time, with different lengths of descriptions depending on whether the person who carried out the task was interested in the film in question or not.

In the middle of the 1990s, Swedish film researchers started to take a greater interest in the old "SF archive". Internationally, research on early film had been established as an academic cutting edge area, with archivists and researchers cooperating in order to gain new knowledge about film history. The original idea to transfer the old "SF archive" into video format to facilitate research came from professor Jan Olsson at the Department of Cinema Studies at the Stockholm University.