1st Sponsor and Supporting Member Meeting in Munich

The idea was to discuss activities to attract the sponsors of our meetings to join FIAT as supporting members and to start a new project - "Catalogueing and Restoration of Endangered Material". And it should at this point be a small group to have an effective discussion. So we invited 15 colleagues and 11 of them were present in Munich: Wolfgang Dehn/SWR, Karl Maier/SWR, Dr. Wolfgang Ebbecke/KirchGruppe, Paul Reichl/KirchGruppe, Paul Glasgow/Sony, Peter Brandl/Digital, Manfred Moser/Adic-Grau, Bernhard Hafenscher/Oracle, Rainer Kellerhals/Tecmath, Josef Veit/Guertler and myself.

In principle, the new concept was positively accepted and some very interesting proposals were presented and will follow on an e-mail basis, i.e. Tecmath is interested to organize and host a website linked to the FIAT website for this new FIAT Catalogue of Endangered Material. Mr. Ebbecke from the Kirch Group wants to combine this catalogueing project with a new digital media number. Mr. Moser from Adic/Grau Storage made the proposal to bring in the FIAT Newsletters reports about technical innovations in our archives (i.e. the robot system of the Kirch Group; how well does the Oracle data bank really work at Nancy Coles Company NBC etc). Mr. Glasgow of Sony underlined the importance of such projects to make FIAT to a real serious partner of the industry. The new representative of Oracle, Mr. Hafenscher, said that the supporting member fee is not really a problem for all these companies - if FIAT brings up an open platform for all the different companies.

So this is the first short report. Find below the paper, that was distributed in Munich. The representatives of IBM, Microsoft and Finn-Lab Oy will be informed about the result in Munich.

"Sponsoring Concept for the FIAT Sponsor and Supporting Member Meeting

In connection with our first Sponsor and Supporting Member Meeting in Munich on May 6th, 1999 in Munich, I would like to present my concept proposal for the new project "catalogueing and restoration of endangered material".

1. FIAT sponsors and supporting members will set up a fond for activities pertaining to catalogueing and restoration of endangered material. The petition committee of the Munich meeting will be in future the jury for these activities.

2. This petition committee should invite other representatives of the media industry to support this fonds.

3. The FIAT treasurer will entrust a sub-account to guarantee the total transparency of every activity in this field.

4. The starting budget will be in the sponsor fees of the first jury members.

5. The first budget will only be contributed to the catalogueing of endangered material.

6. The project will be announced to every FIAT member, but should also be promoted to many other television archives that are not yet FIAT members.

7. The application deadline will be September 1999 (after the announcement in the next FIAT Newsletter).

8. The next meeting of the petition committee will be in Vienna (EBU/FIAT Meeting on June 17th -18th 1999) Santiago de Chile (October 3rd-5th 1999), where the selection according to criterias such as 'how endangered is the material' or 'how interesting is it for potential buyers', etc., will take place.

9. After the Santiago Annual Conference the first accepted proposals will officially be announced and the applicants informed accordingly.

10. After a period of half a year the first catalogues in either English or French must be presented to the petition committee.

11. The petition committee will then meet in Spring 2000 to decide what titles of the catalogued material will be restored, i.e. that the restoration budget for endangered material will be determined. Every member of the committee can now decide on the title of his interest and will receive his own VHS copy of the restored material.

12. As quid pro quo the organisation that received the restoration grant will allow 'his' sponsor the right of first refusal.

13. The first summary of the restoration activities will be presented at the FIAT General Assembly in Vienna in October 2000 and then the jury will officially be established in the FIAT Statutes."

Peter Dusek (archiv@orf.at)
President FIAT/IFTA