Fiat Membership - Know-How and Reuse

To make better use of a FIAT-membership

It goes without saying the FIAT Conferences and Seminars - along with the FIAT web site - are the main sources for transfer of know-how in the area of audiovisual archiving. Using the latter though doesn‰t give the opportunity of the kind of professional discussion that is one of the advantages of participating in a conferenece. On the other hand, travelling is expensive and thus limits the number of staff who can participate at a time.

So why not try to find some kind of middle course by doing it the othe way around, bringing a conference - or at least a part of it - to the archive staff?
The FIAT web site is really a "smorgasbord" to choose from, if you start to check out the agendas of recent FIAT events and need a lecturer for a mini-seminar. Along with the agendas you often find a full presentation on a topic, so that you make use preparations for a vivid discussion.

That is what we did at the NRK TV-archives, since we wanted both different and new views on the use of Television archive material and the marketing of the archives.
A quick check of the web site gave us for example several titles on "Making the Archive Profitable" and "Archive Programming" by our colleague at the SVT in Sweden, Lasse Nilsson, also former Secretary General of FIAT and chair of the Programming & Production Commission. In the beginning of September we invited him to give a lecture on "Archive Programming by the Archive ¬ an Opportunity".

It was a three-hour account of how they have been doing these things at the SVT TV-Archives in Stockholm, covering everything from place in organization, research and production, programme budget and programme marketing to the spin-off effects in marketing the TV-archives itself. And everything accompanied by a wide range of programme examples.

Since the Norwegian and Swedish languages are so close it of course also facilitated a vivid discussion. But judging from the web site, it won't be difficult to find FIAT lecturers in all the most common languages and on whatever topic in the area of audiovisual archiving.
This is one way of making better use of your FIAT membership!

Ingrid Briseid
NRK TV-Archives
E-mail: Ingrid.Briseid@nrk.no