President's Corner

Thursday and Friday, June 17th/18th, the first joint meeting between EBU and FIAT about "Paving the Way to Future Television Archives" was held in the ORF Center in Vienna and from my point of view it was a success. More than 100 delegates participated at this event and half of them were archivists and also FIAT members (see summary below).

Many of the archivists are potential new FIAT members (mainly from Germany). This first dialogue between manufacturers and archivists showed that there is a big gap of knowledge and language between both groups. In a certain way, the representatives of EBU and IRT, of Sony and Panasonic, and so on, organized a big monologue from the technicians to the users. But in the small dialogue that at least started, the technicians learned that they have to study our real situation with all our traditional problems, our psychological barriers, etc. In fact, EBU will intensify and continue this dialogue and FIAT will hopefully get much more support and interest on the manufacturers side. The best information exchange took place, as usual, in the coffee and lunch breaks, and of course at the Heurigen.

There are some other definite results for the project "Catalogueing endangered material". Panasonic and Adic/Grau and Tecmath and others will definitely support this project (see my report about the Munich Meeting). Furthermore, the most active part of the FIAT Documentation Commission (Annemieke de Jong, NAA, Eva-Lis Green, SVT and Herbert Hayduck, ORF) had an additional meeting to plan the seminar in Santiago.

Very interesting was the first contact to our new members in Turkey. Ali Nihat Yazici has to reform the archive and was enthusiastic about our meeting.

So the result of the EBU/FIAT Meeting, is from my point of view excellent for FIAT.

Participants: TRT/Mr. Akkaya
SWR/Mr. Barth, Mr. Fischer, Mr. Pfeiffer, Mr. Bonkosch
NAA/Ms. de Jong, Mr. van Huis
INA/Mr. Frambour
RTBF/Mr. Goossens
NRK/Ms. Grimstad, Mr. Hagberg
BBC/Mr. Hopper, Ms. Owens
WDR/Mr. Klösges
NDR/Mr. Kröger
BR/Mr. Lechl
RTV/Ms. Omladic
IMZ/Mr. Patay
YLE/TV 2/Mr. Savijärvi
Techmath/Mr. Thomas
Turkish TV/Mr. Yazici

// Pro-Bel Ltd.
Tektronix Inc.
Philips Digital Video
Panasonic
IRT
AMEC
Sony
Oracle
AV Media Techn.
CSC Ploenzke
Tandberg Data
Informix Software
Adic/Grau
Victor Company
JVC Professional
Digital Media
HS-Art Digital
Matsushita
Media & Communication
TASC

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