President's Corner

In Sweden the National Archive of Recorded Sound and Moving Images might provide a good service for those interested. But also here you see limitations when it comes to access to the material: `...access to the collection is restricted to researchers only...', I still quote from the above mentioned book.

And what about FIAT/IFTA? Have we dealt with the problem? Not much, I must say. But we let two researchers give lectures relating to this subject at FIAT conferences.

Henrik Grue Bastiansen, a Norwegian, talked about the transmitting of the moon landing and the storage of the transmitted material. He later on published a book called From Minutes to Report. Daily News 1960-1969. He gave his lecture at the FIAT conference in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1993.

At the FIAT conference In Bogensee, Germany, another Norwegian participated with a lecture on the technology of the future. Rune Hjelsvold later on published his dissertation with the title Videostar - A Database for Video Information Sharing. A world of contradiction and a challenge to FIAT.

The problem for researchers - the access to collections world wide - is a problem FIAT's Executive Council has already discussed. An active initiative in this field was approached by the chairman of the Programming and Production Commission, Lasse Nilsson. We will deal with this problem at the next FIAT/IFTA conference, taking place in Budapest in 1997. We are already far ahead with proposals for the agenda. In the future we cannot collect, preserve and reuse the material for the benefit of a small group of people.

Access to the collections costs money and we have to be prepared for the pressure on the archive in the future from universities, colleges and high schools and individual researchers.

At least we must be mentally prepared for the new situation. Join us in Budapest in 1997, a good start for your training to cope with new situations - the researchers.

Tedd Johansen