This article offers a comparative take on the ways audiovisual versus verbal digital archives model our understanding of the past. We focus on content metadata schemas and their role in modeling histories and framing the uses of audiovisual databases. Our empirical corpus includes verbal and audiovisual objects from the five-year period just before the World War II (1935-1939) as presented in two digital databases – the Analytic Bibliography of Estonian Journalism and the Estonian Film Database. The article compares how the different metadata schemas for newspaper articles and newsreels model their objects. As a consequence, metadata schemas shape contemporary perceptions of historical realities in different ways.