President's Corner

It was a hard decision to change our annual World Conference from Rio to Santiago de Chile this autumn, but the economic situation of Brazil is so insecure that we could not even fix the hotel rates. So in Santiago we have a host who excellently organized our first Latin American Seminar last year and has now accepted to help us to organize our meeting in early October. It's my pleasure to give thanks and great appreciation to Director Marcos Salazar and our colleague Amira Arratia Fernandez for their rescue out of this turbulent situation.

Ahere is a second topic that I would like to inform you about: The first EBU Seminar on archive questions was held in Geneva from January 26th - 28th 1999. It was a big success and an EBU working group about archive questions was initiated and will be headed by Horst Schachlbauer, whom we know from many of our meetings. This EBU working group will work very closely together with FIAT. There were some FIAT members in the participants list such as Denis Frambourt, Erik de Groef, Annemieke de Jong, Wolfgang Dehn, Karl Maier, Eva-Lis Green, Stasa Omladic, Serge Roth, Alfredo Tropa, Edwin van Huis, etc.

One first step to further cooperation: EBU and FIAT will organize a confernce about "Standards" in June 17th-18th, 1999 in Vienna - in a certain aspect a continuation of the Standard-Meeting we had in Vienna last year, but will also bring together more representatives of the industry producing new technics for archives along with the users.

Ahe third project will start very soon on May 6th 1999, where we will invite our sponsors and potential supporting members to a meeting in Munich to talk about the possibility of a fond for cataloguing and restoration of endangered tapes. Please nominate potential new supporting members!

I would like to use this opportunity to invite you to write for this Newsletter. I want to have a better dialogue between our members and our Council Members - not only during our annual meetings. We'll start with a short series "Who is Who" in FIAT/IFTA. But I want to continue with the series about the archives of all our members in order to give them an opportunity to introduce themselves.

Best wishes,
Peter Dusek
President