President's Corner

Once again it's time to send out Christmas Greetings and wishes for the New Year - a New Year with a magical date. Hopefully, the Y2K issue will not cause problems on the few days of the year on which even television archivists have some peace. For FIAT, the year 2000 should be a year of vigor, energy and many new initiatives. After the successfull World Congress in Santiago de Chile the preparations have started for the next General Assembly in mid October 2000 in Vienna and naturally, I as the host have the ambition to offer an especially attractive event. Furthermore, the JTS will be held in Paris in January; in mid April we are planning a Management Seminar together with the industry in Amsterdam and also the information system of FIAT will be placed on new tracks. The traditional NewsLetter will be supplemented by a homepage version in which more reports out of the work experience of our members can be found.

So our motto is: "Even better and even more with the methods of the new technolgy era". In this connection I want to ask you a big favor: In the past years we were able to welcome many new members, but on the other hand we lost too many members who apparently do not have the financial recourses. My personal ambition is to get enough funding money from the industry to be able to keep the colleagues with financial problems in FIAT and also to recruit many from countries where the membership fee represents the annual income of an employee. I therefore send this special appeal today: In every country where we have active members, there are institutions such as private television stations or governmental media archives who we could contact for FIAT membership. Give us the names of these institutions, research the names of the archive heads and their directors. I, as FIAT President together with our General Secretary Lasse Nilsson, will then send them respective information material. If every FIAT member nominates only one new colleague of our guild in the coming year, then our efforts will finally prosper in such a way, that we can reach our ambitious goals!

In this connection I would like to call your attention to a possible close cooperation presented by the Soros Foundation that has until now mainly looked after film archives in Eastern Europe and Africa and who wants to help us to intensify our project "Endangered Archives" in those regions, where FIAT up to now had no contacts.

Chile has encouraged us to intensify our international activities. We hope to enforce the Latin American activities. Our next target will be the Arabic Region and Africa. By the way: next year we will have 2 seminars for the Baltic and Balkan countries.

In this spirit, please actively support FIAT, offer impulses and also convey contructive criticism. The General Assembly in Vienna in October will have the ambitious title: Television Archives at the Beginning of the 3. Millennium. We are really living on the border line of a new era!

Dr. Peter Dusek
President