Thank You And See You All Next Time!

The two days of the first FIAT/IFTA Documentation Seminar lie behind us and the members of the Documentation Commission look back on a most successful gathering. We have the feeling that we have definitely done what we have tried to do: informing audiovisual documentalists of the state of the art concerning some very important digital developments and involving archive staff in the current discussion about multimedia standards, but, most importantly, organising a seminar that would manage to broaden the perspectives of the delegates in such a way that the relevance and impact of their own skills and working experience would manifest itself in a digital but distinct way.

To organise a special seminar for audiovisual documentalists and archivists was a long cherished wish of the members of the Documentation Commission, but we only seriously started discussing the idea some one and a half year ago. In 1997, during the last FIAT Conference, in Budapest, we distributed a questionnaire on the matter amongst the FIAT-delegates. From the results we found that most archive members were taken by the idea of such an event. Most of them would send one of their staff and one or two archive managers even considered sending two people! Calculations we made at that time showed us that we could expect some 30-40 people and the moment we learned that the BBC would be so kind as to host us we decided to head for London in Spring 1998. As we have seen on the 7th and 8th of May the number of delegates eventually proved to be almost four times as many as we had expected. Most archives had sent at least two of their staff and a great deal even four people or more!

We also designed the seminar programme by means of the questionnaire. The top three of the subjects most wanted to be discussed were appointed as the main topic of the Seminar: future archival and documentation systems, as connected to data management and automatic indexing. So, during the Seminar we had several speakers telling us, from several angles, about the state of the art concerning standards and metadata, vector models and video parsing, media asset management and digital data capturing. Relevant and important subjects, sometimes defined by a terminology that must have sounded new to some of the delegates but this was often just a matter of close listening; each presentation dealt after all, in one way or another, with the core of the daily work of most of the Seminar delegates: cataloguing and documentation within a television production environment.

Wor making this first Documentation Seminar possible I would again like to thank BBC Information and Archives, in particular Peter Cox and Adam Lee, the members of their staff and the technical staff at the BBC Conference Centre for their tremendous hospitality and cooperation. Furthermore, I would like to thank all the speakers for their interesting contributions. I also want to express my gratitude to Eva-Lis Green, our co-chair, to the other members of the Documentation Commission and to the FIAT administrative secretary, Gösta Johansson, who have all worked so hard in designing and preparing the Seminar. Last but not least, I would like to thank all the delegates. After all, they were the ones that made it all happen! The enormous attendance can be seen as proof of both the success formula of the Seminar format and the current relevance of the working fields of the Documentation Commission of FIAT/IFTA.

We do hope everyone had an enjoyable and interesting two days. The Commission will now start preparing itself for the Firenze conference in September and after that we will be heading for the second Documentation Seminar, in 1999, somewhere in a nice European city...

Hope to see you all then !

Annemieke de Jong
Netherlands Audio Visual Archive (NAA)
Chairperson Documentation Commission FIAT/IFTA

Comments, ideas, suggestions concerning this and following Seminars of the Documentation Commission of FIAT/IFTA can be sent to:
asmdejong@ naa.nl
eva-lis.green@svt.se