Latest News - May 2005

• SEAPAVAA Conference
• Asia Media Summit
• Programming the Beijing seminar
• Call for the preservation of the world broadcast heritage
• New members
• Web Site audience

SEAPAVAA Conference, Brunei, 2-6 May

Emmanuel Hoog and Dominique Saintville have brought the FIAT IFTA greetings to the 9th SEAPAVAA (South East Asia Pacific Audiovisual Archive Association) Conference and participated in the symposium about television archiving.

The SEAPAVAA conference was hosted by Radio Television Brunei. It has gathered some fifty film and broadcast archivists and librarians from South East Asia, Australia and New Zealand.

The conference theme was "Digital dawn: audiovisual archiving in transition". The presentations tackled problems and issues of audiovisual archives in the region with regards to period of transition from analogue to digital archiving.

In the concluding forum of the symposium, a set of interesting issues emerged, very similar to those which are familiar to the FIAT IFTA membership, such as:

• archivists need to be advocates, they need to persuade, change mindsets, educate, pursue a variety of funding sources
• archives need to continually invest in training
• archivists need to maintain control of content, selection policy, technical and intellectual standards and client relationship ; technology needs to remain the servant, not the master of the archive
• the audiovisual archive is a vital expression of national and cultural identity
• the issue of the purpose of digitisation was raised. The discussion revealed differing positions according to the nature of the archive. For film archive, digitisation is a solution for facilitating the access to the collections, whereas, for broadcast archive, it is also a good solution for long term preservation.

We had promising contacts with some of the participants interested in the migration experience of FIAT ITA members. They are all engaged in a digitisation policy : the Brunei TV Archive, the Vietnam Film Institute, the Thai Broadcast Museum, the National Archive of Singapore (who is already a FIAT member).

More information, papers and pictures can be found at the SEAPAVAA website: www.seapavaa.org/homesite/BruneiConf.html

Asia Media Summit, Kuala Lumpur, 9-10 May

The Summit was organised by our member, the Asia Pacific Institute for Broadcast Development, in cooperation with the regional broadcasting unions, several international organisations - ITU, UNESCO, FIAT IFTA, and national companies such as CCTV, RTM and INA.

The summit was a big success, gathering more than 400 participants - ministers, top media executives, journalists, academics and archivists - from 65 countries and 187 organisations. The summit proved to be the" meeting place for broadcasters from the region and beyond to discuss their common challenges and find the required solutions with a view to create a better understanding in such a diverse situation".

FIAT IFTA has sponsored the Summit. For the first time in such an event, the issue of the cultural value and of the preservation of broadcast archives was addressed. In the first plenary session, dedicated to "The cultural challenge to globalisation", Emmanuel Hoog delivered a speech demonstrating the crucial role of audiovisual archives to ensure the world cultural diversity. In the afternoon, Emmanuel chaired a workshop on digital archiving in which were participating Ray Edmonson (Seapavaa), Karl Lippe (AIBD), Li Ruigang (Shanghai Media Group) and Daniel Teruggi (INA and PrestoSpace).

One of the purposes of the Summit was to elaborate recommendations to the WSIS, the World Summit of the Information Society, which is due to take place in Tunis next November. Among the twelve recommendations, one is especially dedicated to the "Preservation of radio and television archives" : www.aibd.org.my/conferences/2005/summit

Programming the Beijing seminar

Kuala Lumpur was the right place to meet the officials from the SARFT, the Chinese ministry of Information, and especially Mr Cao Yin, and to progress in the programming of the Beijing seminar, intended to draw the audiovisual archivists from China and the region.

The seminar, which will take place on 26, 27 and 28 October 2005, is a joint initiative, gathering the SARFT, CCTV, AIBD, INA and FIAT IFTA. It will be a follow up of what was done for archives during the Asia Media Summit, in line with the recommendation sent to the WSIS by AIBD.

The seminar will aim to address three main topics:

• the situation of audiovisual archives in Asia
• available methodologies and technologies for preservation and access
• economical, cultural, educational and political issues in dealing with the preservation and exploitation of TV archives.

Call for the preservation of the world broadcast heritage : latest updates

The call has already gathered more than 8.000 signatures from ninety countries. Of course, we need more signatures, from all countries. You can always sign on line at : www.memoryindanger.org

The President of FIAT is organising, in connection with the Department of Information of the United Nations (it is also a television archive !), Unesco, and the national representations to the United Nations, a resolution which will be tabled to the UN by France and sustained by all FIAT countries, such as the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, Croatia, Romania who have already demonstrated their interest.

This initiative aims at giving the best visibility to the FIAT IFTA Call for the preservation of the world broadcast heritage and at persuading the governments to launch or push the relevant preservation programmes where it proves to be needed.

In the frame of the cooperation with FIAT IFTA sister organisations, the Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archive Associations, has requested each of these organisations to decide "whether they consider the Call as a statement which CCAAA should support". IFLA, the International Federation of Library Associations has said "yes". FIAF, the International Federation of Film Archives, AMIA, the Association of Moving Image Archivists, and SEAPAVAA have stated that the text of the call was especially relevant for broadcast archives. Therefore, they are encouraging their members to sign it.

The Asia Pacific Institute for Broadcast Development formally supports the Call and has just put a permanent link to the FIAT IFTA web site in its home page : www.aibd.org.my

Welcome to the members who have joined FIAT IFTA in April and May

Full member

• Institut de la Communication audiovisuelle de Polynésie, Tahiti

Associate organisational members

• MICT, Media and ICT, University of Ghent
• Multimedia Laboratory , University of Ghent

Associate individual member

• Sue Malden

FIAT IFTA web site audience in 2005

The audience have doubled since last year at the same period.

• January : 33 917 page requests
• February : 36 425
• March : 42 957
• April : 36 204