President's Corner

Dear Colleagues,

Although the digital revolution is steadily accelerating in a breathtaking speed, one tends to stay in analog locomotion technics when it comes to realize simple aims such as the increase of FIAT members or supporting members.

But in both fields we have been able to achieve a successfull balance. Our newest member comes from Tunesia. We first met Mr. Wahid Braham of ERTT at the Athens EUREKA Meeting which was organized by our colleague Kyriaki Arseni of ERT. I then met him again at the Joint Technical Syposium in Paris and now his organisation has officially decided to join FIAT. Hopefully, we will find more members from this region – contacts to Morocco and Algeria are still pending. But FIAT wants to intensify its activities in Africa, Asia, Latin America and all parts of the world, that until now have no representatives in FIAT. A strong signal in this direction is that the FIAT Board decided in Chile to coopt 1 FIAT member each to overtake this chore on every continent: for Latin America this is the host of our last World Conference, Mr. Marcos Salazar, Technical Director of TNC; for North Africa and Arab Countries we cooped Mr. Khaled Shawky, who is working in Rome for the private Egyptian television station ART and will support the activities of the FIAT Board through letters in Arab language to all the Information Ministries in these countries to provoke the right interest in the new technical possibilities; for Asia our colleague from NHK, Mr. Yukiyasu Ohi, has been coopted to the Council and last but not least Jim Lindner from Vidipax and also AMIA will cover North America as Ambassador of FIAT.

The second main target was to increase the number of supporting members. At our Sponsor Meeting in Vienna on February 24^th, we brought together a dozen representatives of the electronic industry: CSC Ploenzke Austria and Germany, Guertler, IBM Austria and Germany, Informix, JVC Germany, KirchGruppe, Noah Audio Solution, Philips Austria, Siemens Austria, Techmath. This was a further step to the project "Endangered Archives" and to find sponsors for the up-coming Vienna General Assembly in October. At the moment this looks very promising.

Apropos Vienna General Assembly: The preparation committee of the Board fixed an outline of the meeting in the middle of October. The title how has a very poetic touch: "Media Asset Management for the 21^st Century – Content is King – Meta Data is Queen – Archiving Reigns overall". Furthermore, the program starts on Sunday morning, October 15^th as announced, but the Opening Cocktail will alread be on Saturday evening, October 14^th. The detailed program will be in the next printed NewsLetter and I hope that this event will continue as successfully as in the past meetings.

In this connection I am sure you all recall the impressive demonstration of the RAI Teche project in Florence. Meanwhile the Teche project has been realized. In the begining of March I visited the RAI Teche Archive and was warmly hosted by our new Board member Dr.Angelo Sferrazza. In these two days I could study the realization of the digitization of television and radio programs, but also of stills and books and I think no other institution can show such a huge amount of material on new digital formats. I was totally impressed and hope that RAI will demonstrate these activities at the Vienna General Assembly.

Finally, I have to inform you that we postponed our Management Seminar in Amsterdam to Spring 2001. The preparation time was too short and this first dialogue between the industry and the responsible directors for digitization investments is too delicate and must be handeled accordingly.

But as I mentioned at the beginning, the organisational pace of FIAT is analog and not on the bits and bytes tracks.

Peter Dusek, President