From the Stockholm horizon

A strong bitterly northern wind and a first thin layer of snow on the ground.Definitely below zero. The first signs of winter. Then it's nice to lean back in your chair and remember the Chilean spring in the beginning of October. Of course, not only because of the nice weather at the time, but all the colleagues you met and new friends you made at the World Conference in Santiago. And above all, a well organized conference with a programme worthwhile travelling for. We also know that behind every successful event there is a host organization - this time Television Nacional de Chile. On behalf of the FIAT/IFTA I would like again to thank the TVN-people for their dedicated work and contribution to a very successful conference.

Making friends at cocktail party: Nisiclér Figueira of Brazil's Globo and Mr Ohi and his colleagues from NHK	Coffee break in the Hotel Carrera foyer: Gerhard Stanz, ORF, got his eyes on something interesting!

I will try to give you a few brief and personal impressions of the conference programme that I think really answered to the above general theme of the Conference. The full papers presented at the conference you will find on our website (fiatifta.org), easy to read on the screen and to download in pdf-format (you will need an id and a password). If you don't have access to the Internet you can always order them as printouts from the FIAT/IFTA office.
The keynote speaker this year was the Managing Director of the TVN, Mr. René Cortazar Sanz.

Opening of the Conference. From left: Lasse Nilsson, Secr. Gen., Peter Dusek, President, René Cortazar Sanz, TVN Manag. Dir., Tedd Johansen, vice Pres.

Photo: TVN

The Television Archive Award

If Mr Cortazar Sanz did mark the importance of the Conference for Latin America as a whole and the 30th Anniversary celebrating TVN as broadcaster in particular, the other main event of the opening day is always the screening of the three shortlisted programmes for the Award. This is an opportunity to see the very state of the art when it comes to programming based on archive material. Read more about it in Karl Maier's article on the Award in this issue.

Media Assets Management

The "buzz words" of audiovisual archiving today are definitely "Media Asset Management" and "Meta data". That was obvious following the second session and a good exponent of a half of the conference's theme. Annemieke de Jong gave us some important input on the latter from her exhaustive dissertation. This work was originally published in Dutch, but it may be translated and published in full later this year in English by courtesy of Ms. de Jong and NAA.

Sten Frykholm, Sveriges Television, moderating the afternoon sessions	Fernando Martinez Ruiz

Ms. de Jong pointed out the key role of audiovisual archives in the digitizing development, since they hold the actual material, digitized and analog, along with a lot of traditional archiving experience. But she also emphasized - repeated from other angles by the other speakers - that there is a huge need for new methods to identify, manage and communicate digital audiovisual data. "To solve the problems we need completely new knowledge, a whole new set of documentation rules and principles as well as a digital translation of our old skills.", she stated. "The change of scenery, the changing roles imply that others will be active in the field of media-archiving as well.", "... since the archiving processes seem to extend themselves to areas outside of the traditional environment." The number of new supporting members from the industrial area and their interest in our conferences during the last years emphasizes this.

Both the largest broadcaster of Japan, NHK, and the Informix Corp. of USA gave exciting presentations on the practical applications. NHK presented their total concept solution from input of transmitted material to editing solutions on pc. The Informix solution presented a number of applications adjustable to different system platforms. Find more information about it on our website. This session was then followed by workshops where pilot projects covering such areas as digital news archiving, browsing and video were discussed.

"Archives of the New World"

The first half of the general theme conference was of course an allusion to the part of the World where the event was taking place. But it was a "New World" in the sense that we didn't know very much of all the exciting things happening on the Latin American audiovisual archiving scene, despite of the economical turbulence the continent has been suffering from lately. Mr. Sanz gave us a few hints in his key word speech. But here we got a vivid presentation by Fernando Martinez Ruiz from the UTE in Mexico on a project on the organization and use of archive material in a national pedagogical system.

In Professor Silvia Romano's, the National University of Cordoba in Argentina, project on rescuing, preserving, and analyzing the news film archive of Channel 10 we may have a very important model for such projects in Latin America. By all means our Latin American colleagues now know where to find important experience in this field.

Just as important as presenting projects going on in this continent was "putting the Latin American audiovisual archives on the World map". Here we had a number of presentations, old acquaintances as well as new ones. Of the latter category was Andrea Granda's TeleAmazonas in Ecuador, Eliana Chaparro's RCTV in Venezuela and Silvia Romano's University of Cordoba in Argentina. The Brazilians were represented by the longtime FIAT member Globo and Nisiclér Figueira as well as by EPTV in São Paolo and Celeste Oliveira and EPTV's Livia Lucas. The FIAT stronghold in the Caribbean is Cinemateca del Caribe and Sara Harb. The host TVN was well represented as other Chilean archives, among them Paulina Montaldo Ortiz.

The Digital Era Professional Training

I think we at last have managed to put the spotlight on one of the crucial aspects in the digitizing work - professional training - through the revival of the Training Commission. Annemieke de Jong emphasized the importance already earlier in her introduction to the Asset management session. The Commission Chair Branko Bubenik developed the theme in the afternoon and it was followed by a workshop where Jacqui Gupta of the BBC Bristol gave an overview of the process from establishing the staff skills requirements, the recruiting and securing skills and development of staff for the needs of a new media environment. And the best of all - you can now find the material on the FIAT website and you know whom to discuss these matters with in the future.

Paulina Montaldo Ortiz	Eliana Chaparro	Silvia Romano
Sara Harb	Celeste Oliveira	Livia Lucas

"Hands on experiences"

The good thing with a conference like ours is the mixture of the important theoretical discourse and the transfer of really "hands on experiences". In the latter category you find two intriguing solutions on a daily present problem - how to transfer old card catalogue information to digitized format. Alain Goossens from the Belgian RTBF for example, showed us how they have transferred their hand written cards to an Internet searchable database with a low cost solution that was very exciting. Birgitte Rathsach from DR, Denmark, gave us some hints on the problems in transferring card catalogue data and how to avoid them. Participating in FIAT conferences makes you avoid "inventing the wheel again"!

The workshop on the "Vinegar Syndrome" by Morten Jacobsen of Dancan International I'm sure caused cold shivers running down more than my spine! But he shared his experiences on methods to track the "sick" material on our shelves and how to prevent it, luckily.

Sharing experiences was also the theme of Jim Wheeler's workshop, where he presented two papers discussing video preservation. How do we cope with all the video formats and machines that now are history? Jim gave some interesting answers to that as well as pros and cons of the discussion on analog versus digital. And will the DVD solve our problems.

The Vidipax Managing Director Jim Lindner provided the Conference's most daring and forward pointing at archive futuristic and philosophical discourse. Brilliantly put forward, thought-provoking and fun as always with Jim on stage. Find their full papers on the website.

Sony's Paul Glasgow preparing his input to the Digital Archiving Session

Scholarly access to our archives?

Do we want that? That was the discussion on the workshop moderated by Chair Steve Bryant of the latest working body of FIAT - the Television Studies Work group (TSW). Steve presented the first results of an inquiry made among FIAT members and scholars on these matters. It aroused a lot of discussion, there is a lot of both problems and opportunities in this topic. It is the matter of "making new friends" as well as finding a wider use of our archives and profiting from this use for the programming. Also read the article in this issue on the Stockholm Conference "Approaches to Television Studies".

From the Award and final dinner: Anita Aguirre, TVN, Vice Pres. Sue Malden, BBC, Secr. Gen. Lasse Nilsson, SVT, Paulina Montaldo and Amira Arratia, TVN	Press coverage of the Award Ceremony at the Santa Rita Vineyard	Chilean dancers at Santa Rita

Wide screen, Archive programming, Rights and Material Migration

The space in this issue of the Newsletter doesn't allow for a complete and detailed report on everything on the ConferenceÇs programme. The heading only gives you a hint of what I have left out. But you can find most of it on our website. You should worry about the implications of wide screen for your archive collections.

And you should listen closely to the users of your archive. The very informal presentations by our Danish colleagues Christian Clausen and Joergen Seidlin produced a lot of good laughs, but also some thoughts of consideration from an archivists point of view. What is the producerÇs demand on audiovisual archives in the future. The producers of the three programmes shortlisted for the Award gave us some good advice.

Dr Tropa from Portugal once again alerted us on the difficult rights issues on using archive material. And we still have a lot to do on the old video formats transfer issue, formats for preservation and long time storage.

As we took off for the final dinner and Award ceremony at the Santa Rita Vineyards, I think we all were quite convinced that international cooperation, as in these conferences and work groups, is absolutely crucial if we are to solve our problems and develop the audiovisual archiving for the future.

Lasse Nilsson
Secretary General FIAT/IFTA