Notes from the FIAT/IFTA Conference in Antalya, Turkey, 2002

Photo (c) SVT AB : Berit Greider

At 06.35 on Saturday the 12:th of October, a plane was leaving Stockholm/Arlanda with the destination Antalya in Turkey, where the FIAT/IFTA yearly conference 2002 were to be held this time. We were six delegates from the SVT Archive department, Eva-Lis Green, Birgitta Werner, Pelle Wennerlund, Maud Dahlström, Tove Kleiven and myself, who met in this early hour to fly to Antalya. Along with our luggage we brought the comprehensive conference programme, which pointed out to us that we wouldn't get very much spare time, but nevertheless we hoped to get some sun now and then as a change from the cold and grey weather of Stockholm.

And we were not disappointed. The temperature was 27 degrees C when we came out of the Antalya airport, and I, who wore thick black stockings, felt a burning sensation on my legs. A strange feeling for a Swede in October! As soon as we got to our hotel and had checked in to our rooms, we went down to the sea for a swim. The water was absolutely crystal clear and with the temperature of 24 degrees C! In the background there were pointed mountains that gave the impression of a side-scene in a spaghetti western. The whole hotel area at the Renaissance Antalya Resort seemed to belong in a film. Asphalt paths ran through verdant lawns bordered with palm trees. Lots of beautiful flowers and hibiscus bushes everywhere. On the way down to the sea there was a huge swimming pool. The only missing ingredient was probably Marcello Mastroianni in a white suit, strolling down the paths.

Sunday 13th October

On Sunday night the 200 delegates from all over the World met formally for the first time on a cocktail party by the pool. I couldn't help but feel a bit lost where I was standing among all these unknown people. But I was lucky to run into the jovial Daniel DiPierro from CBS News in New York. He introduced me, the American way, to a lot of people from different TV stations around the World, and maintained a polite conversation at the same time. If there is anything that one can envy the Americans, it is their social skills!

Monday 14th October

The conference itself started on Monday. This year's theme was "At the Bridge between Analogue end Digital / The Past and the Future?". The morning sessions dealt with different aspects and problems regarding archiving the contents on the web, with speeches by Annemieke de Jong from Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and Philippe Poncin from INA, France. Annemieke de Jong opened her speech with a story by the Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges : "The library of Babylon" from 1941, about a universal library where absolutely everything that has been written throughout the World, all human knowledge, is collected. But what at first seems to be a wonderful dream where humans felt themselves the masters of an immense and intact treasure, soon turns into a nightmare when it appears that the beautiful library has no index. Everything is there somewhere, but it is impossible to know where. De Jong made a comparison between Borge's story and the cyberspace as it is known today; a place where all knowledge is collected but without the catalogue that makes it possible to find just what you want. Archivists, librarians and others must define their assignment as the building of new ways of collecting knowledge, to make a new kind of index.

Next item was the selling of archive material over the Internet. Peter Fydler, Commercial Director at British Pathe gave an inspiring account of how they had put 50 000 hours of work on creating a digital archive available throughout the World via a modem. Giorgio Diminio from the Italian TV Company RAI practically talked about the same thing, but from a more technical angle, more difficult to grasp but certainly interesting if you have any knowledge of it. The morning session ended with a speech by Jim Lindner, in which he listed a couple of useful questions, for instance what happens when all current content is digital from the very beginning?, all content is available immediately?, can we even call them archives any more when the users can get to the content themselves whenever they want to? What happens when there is no longer tapes or films to take care of? Is the traditional audiovisual archive the best "keeper of the bits"? Here Jim Lindner answered himself by indicating that archivists generally have little experience running networks and IT departments, so perhaps it is better to let the experts handle such things. And, asked Lindner, is that a job that we archivist really want? Perhaps we should just concentrate on the contents of the archive.

Then we had lunch and time for a quick dip in the Mediterranean. The afternoon was assigned to the digital technology; metadata, formats and items like that, where a couple of experts, among others Richard Wright from the BBC, discussed the new technology.

Tuesday, 15th October

Tuesday's lectures gave an insight into how far the digitalization of the news archives in some countries have come. This day we were crossing our fingers for Eva-Lis Green and Tove Kleiven, who were going to give their speeches, and were a little nervous. Herbert Hayduck from ORF in Austria opened the session with a lecture about their experience from 4 months of working with the Digital Newsroom. It was interesting to compare their way of changing the workflow with our own situation here at the SVT. It was a little "down to earth" compared to yesterday's technological excesses.

Then it was time for our own Sandy Shaw , Eva-Lis Green (who performs barefoot like the British singer) to talk about the digitization of the news at the SVT, and also a little about what will happen in the immediate future, among other things the digitization of general content television (fiction and non-fiction) and the new digital channels. The audience seemed interested, and asked a lot of questions at the workshop afterwards. Tove Kleiven's speech about our stills archive with the title "Stills going strong!" dealt with questions about system architecture, content, users, policy and strategy. Tove illustrated her speech with a few well-picked pictures from the stills archive of the SVT, that was a success. Both Eva-Lis and Tove did a great job, and aroused the audience's interest in what we are doing at the SVT.

Yasusuke Ohi and Horoyuki Sato informed about NHK in Japan, where they are building the biggest digital archive centre of Japan, which also will be one of the World's biggest digital archives. It will contain approximately 250 000 TV programmes and 900 000 news items. Their new "Program Production Management System" has been in trial operation since 1999 and plan to start regular operation in the new "NHK Archives" building from February 2003. Then the archives will also be open to the public.

In the afternoon one could choose between a numbers of workshops, among other things a session about the Presto project (Preservation Technology for European Broadcast Archives).

Wednesday 16th October

Wednesday started with a presentation of the three short films based on archive material, that previously had been shortlisted for the contest best archive film. The three contributions was, fromTelevisió de Catalunya, Spain: "Chomón," about the filmmaker Segundo de Chomón, from Pathé TV, France: "The great adventure of the Newsreels : the Pioneers", with archive material on historical events like for instance the explosion of the airship Hindenburg, and from Czech "Hockey" about the historical importance, not least as political power of resistance during the twentieth century. All delegates could vote for his or her favourite film, and we were informed later that the Spanish film "Chomón" won the voting.

For the first time the "New Media Award" winner was elected: the DVD Rom for educational purposes called "USA, the sound of...", which contains up to 40 percent of archive material. Producer : SWR.

Later that day a session with the title "When bridges brake down: 2001.09.11" was held consisting of lecturers from different countries who brought forward some aspects on the archiving of news material when something extraordinary happens, like the attack on World Trade Center. Dr Alison Preston, Research manager at The Research Centre for TV and Interactivity in Glasgow, told us about a research project aimed at analysing how the news broadcasters throughout the World covered the events of September 11:th, and the following war in Afghanistan. Their research started out from six different dates when important events took place. Of course there were big differences in the broadcasting depending on the relationship between the current country and USA.

Then Istar Buscher from SWR presented a thesis on the use of archive material in news reporting when something of vital importance happens.

At the end of the session we got to know a little about everyday life in a TV archive where the flow of news increases rapidly. Billy Segal, head of the film archive at IBA, the public service TV in Israel, told us about all the news material concerning the frequent terror attacks in Israel. During the period between May 2001 and August 2002, 71 big terror attacks occurred, which together with the follow-ups makes a tremendous news flow. Of course that creates problems for the archive staff, the cataloguing is delayed, lack of space for the material that hasn't yet been catalogued, mental stress for the staff because they everyday have to deal with horrible pictures and scenarios, which decreases their productivity. Segal pointed out some solutions to the problems, among other things the importance of letting the staff sometimes catalogue entertainment programs, to decrease the mental stress. It was interesting to hear, on such an everyday level, how they work in an archive similar to ours, and yet under such utterly different circumstances.

In the afternoon the FIAT/IFTA general assembly took place, with election of a new president after Peter Dusek. The new president for FIAT/IFTA is Emmanuel Hoog from INA, France.

Thursday 17th October

Annemieke de Jong and Arjo van Loo from The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision opened the Thursday session with a presentation of their multimedia achive iMMix. The rest of the morning speeches dealt with the issue of different countries laws concerning legal deposit. Our Finish colleague Richard Creutz, presented a survey he had made of how these laws work in 26 different countries. Sven Allerstrand, head of SLBA (the national archive for sound and picture) in Sweden talked about their work. They have quite a long experience in the field, since audiovisual material have been included in the legal deposit law since 1979, when ALB (nowadays SLBA) was founded.

Elisabeth F Watson, librarian at Learning Resource Centre University of the West Indies in Barbados, talked about the somewhat different problem those countries that used to be colonies have to get documents and other things from their cultural heritage, back from the colonial countries. When countries want to acquire duplicates of any such documents, they have to pay high fees for them. Just think of, said Watson, all the non-British resources at the BBC or the Caribbean-based cultural expressions that can be found in French and other European libraries, archives and museums!

The last workshop of the conference dealt with the strategies, tactics and funding for the legacy of audiovisual archives. Our Eva-Lis Green was one of the speakers; she talked about the new archive policy of SVT. Catherine Lacken from SWR, Germany, did a great, educational presentation with the title "Crossing the Bridge from the Analogue to the Digital Domain", where she very pedagogically pointed out what has happened, happens and will happen in the future when we go from film- and tape-based to server-based preservation. People came up to Lacken afterwards and said things like : "your presentation should have opened the whole conference !", at which she seemed somewhat surprised. I felt, and presumably others with me, that her speech was a good starting point for what, on different levels in different countries of course, is happening right now in our audiovisual archives.

In the evening we were invited by our hosts to a closing dinner, The dinner, who was held in the garden of the hotel, offered a lot of good food and also some Turkish cultural manifestations like folk dances and a belly dancer who danced for us on sky high heals. She moved in a way that resembled "an electric eel's", as one of our colleagues at SLBA reflected.

Photo (c) Official TRT conference photo : Dressed up for closing dinner (from left : Maud Dahlstroem, Birgitta Werner, Per Wennerlund, Berit Greider, Tove Kleiven - all SVT, Sweden ; Jim Lindner, Library of Congress, USA ; Sven Allerstrand, SLBA, Sweden ; Jonas Collsioe, TV4, Sweden)

Friday 18th October

Excursion day. Maud and I decided to go on a bus tour to the ancient city of Termessos; the ancient city situated high up into the Güllük mountains a few miles northwest of Antalya. We had to, under the guidance of our excellent guide, climb some kilometre up to the ruins of the old city's amphitheatre from which there were a beautiful view over the powerful mountains. The path up into the mountain was bordered with remains of the city walls, tombs and buildings, often hidden by vegetation. After the mountain climbing we want to an historical museum in Antalya and visited also the harbour of the city. It felt good to be able to see and learn at least a little about Turkish history and ordinary city life, after spending a whole week in the hotel area!

On Saturday we went back to Sweden again, fortified and inspired by all the new things we've learned about our profession - and of course the wonderful weather in Turkey !

Berit Greider, Archive Editor SVT
January 2003