Announcing a new service : the On line guide to FIAT members Archives

Hello to all FIAT/IFTA members !

Many of you have told us in recent times that you would very much like to be able to gain information about archive management activities and progress from the wide range of archives represented by FIAT/IFTA.

The Programme & Production Commission saw the potential value of this information to FIAT and to individual members, so agreed to take on this project.

Now, the new FIAT/IFTA administration is very pleased to tell you that one of our founding members, RAI, together with the Programme & Production Commission have built a sophisticated database to collect and hold this information. It will be accessible at http://www.fiatiftaweb.rai.it and linked to the FIAT web site.

It will be an easy-to-use tool for the collection and presentation of facts and information that archive managers frequently need to use in their daily work, both about their own archive and comparison with the individual or the totality of FIAT members.

The database will be used to gather information that is essential for daily archive management and strategy work in each individual archive. The information can be regularly updated.

So, if members want to, they can use this database as their own management resource to keep a record of holdings and activities (statistics). The database will give centrally updated facts and information - an easy, quick overview of the situation - and with an annual updating, it will help you to see the development of your archives. Amendment of this information will be restricted to the individual archive managers.

Equally usefully, it will also be possible to access the data on all other FIAT members. This will give vital comparative statistics and information to help give an overview of the state of media archives at any given time, and on any major topic. For example : How fast are your collections growing ? How much do you have to migrate ? How much is digitized ? How does this compare with others ? and so on.

The Statistical summaries will indicate progress on the key areas of archive work for each archive e.g. intake/acquisition, cataloguing, de-selection, growth in holdings, formats held, that will give a quick overview and comparison with other archives

At the same time the database serves as a memberlist - always updated. It will be much easier to get in contact with each other. We all know how time consuming it is to find the right person in another organisation. It will be much easier to find archives and colleagues in similar situations as your own organisation/archive when you, for instance, need information about different database systems, etc.

Finally, this will help the FIAT management make more effective contact with all its members and improve the service and spread of information to members.

You will shortly be receiving a request to apply for an input login and password to access the input fields of the database.

We would also like to be able to display your logo as part of the database, so please supply your company logo in gif format.

Sue Malden
March 2003