|
|
|
 |
<< Back to Previous Conferences page
This is the last session of our conference. I would like with Steve Bryant to review the main issues that we have been addressing, to highlight some of the outcomes of the conference, and to set the scene for the next months.
I would like to personnaly focus on three main points :
The first point regards the official recognition of the vital responsibility of FIAT IFTA for promoting, on the international scene, the value of the broadcast archives and the urgent need to organize their preservation and access. Both Unesco and the United Nations have sent a very clear message to this conference. Their messages will be posted to the FIAT web site, so that you can easily circulate them within your own company and country.
I am also extremely satisfied by the progress made in the area of FIAT cooperation with such organisations as the Agence de la Francophonie, the European Broadcasting Union, FOCAL, and CCAAA. Thanks to Crispin Jewitt for joining the conference. This conference was the right place to very efficiently liaise with them and agree on common aims and concrete actions.
Let me give you just one example : the preparation of the World Electronic Media Forum in Tunis. The joint EBU / FIAT Forum was already scheduled, but here, with Neil Regan, we could agree on the precise content and objective : the finalisation of the statement on archives, that was first drafted in Kuala Lumpur last May on the occasion of the Asia Media Summit. The objective is to have it endorsed, by the European broadcasters, then pass the statement on to the World Summit of the Information Society which will gather a great number of heads of States, in Tunis, next November.
The second important issue is : how can we help endangered archives ? What FIAT can do ? What FIAT members can do ? What endangered archives can do for themselves ? This is a recurrent issue for our organisation. I have decided at the beginning of this year to launch a process aiming at defining a FIAT policy. The workshop chaired by Alain Goossens on Saturday afternoon, was a first step. It gathered our archivist colleagues from Africa, the representative of the Agence de la Francophonie, INA specialists, myself, as well as some prospective " sponsors " such as National Geographic, Sony, or the Thomson Foundation. We met again yesterday, and developped some very concrete lines of action, a mixed set of initiatives coming from the African archives, from FIAT and its members. They include :
The third issue regards FIAT methods of cooperation and administration. It is now the 21st Century and FIAT should use technology for its benefit in the way our members use it to manage their archive. We should make a more efficient and wider use of the possibilities provided by the Internet : I have already explained the project to post a lobbying kit on the FIAT website for use by each of you. I am also going to propose to the FIAT EC to introduce voting procedures by Internet. We have already used these within the EC. We might extend this procedure to our membership, so that we do not repeat the experience of not getting the votes necessary to change the statutes. We should also add a forum to the web site to continue the discussion on the challenges faced by archives. Steve will report on this later. Finally I intend to propose to the Board tomorrow to reconsider the role of the Commissions in order to realign their purpose with the future agenda of FIAT.
Now, it's time to leave the floor to Steve who will report on the other important issues that have been addressed during the conference : the democratisation of access, technology issues. I'll come back later to set the scene of FIAT forthcoming events.
Our conference theme has been "Opening Up Our Archives !" and the democratisation of access was very much the theme of the first day. We heard about excellent initiatives and progress from RTE, Beeld en Geluid and INA, plus the development of a national archive designed to be totally accessible from the outset in Hungary. Democratisation of access is happening anyway, whether we wish it or not, through technology, but the fact that so many member archives are actively pursuing it is very encouraging. The point which impressed me most from the session was Edwin van Huis' espousal of different documentation values for different user groups - it is how we interpret our collections to the outside world which counts now.
Interpretation and curation were themes which came back many times during the conference, which chimes with developments at my own organisation, the British Film Institute. The whole conference seemed based on the assumption that wider access is a "good thing" and all the sessions seemed in some way directed towards that goal. Thus the technological issues we considered on the second day all linked in to the issue of open archives: mobile phone technology, highly accessible archive format standards and a range of ways of using new media to access our archives were presented and educational uses were considered in the afternoon workshop I attended.
But for me, the most significant result of these sessions was that two issues we have been talking about for many years seemed much clearer: firstly, we were presented, by Jim Lindner, with a strong recommendation of JPEG2000 as a digital archival format (as well as being right for digital access purposes); secondly, we have spent much time discussing whether archiving the internet was possible or even desirable - this year we were shown how it is done.
The Old World and New World sessions on the second and third days were, in a sense, "traditional", but also what FIAT does best: that is, presenting useful information on what archives are doing around the world and illustrating a wide diversity of work. It was particularly good to get such a comprehensive survey of the US scene. Developments at the Library of Congress are particularly spectacular and much of the archiving in the USA now seems co-ordinated, where previously it was fragmented.
Throughout this conference, I have been struck by the contribution of Howard Besser and the students from his excellent course at New York University, which is training the moving image archivists of the future. For the purposes of this summary, I sought out the views of those students, in order to gain the opinions of well-informed outsiders on our activities. They told me that we talk too much about digital asset management, at the expense of considering the preservation of traditional carriers and considering the problems of small archives. They stressed the need for more training courses like their own, in order to cope with the scale of the task (FIAT will be discussing this with its CCAAA partners) and they asked for access to our documents and internships in our archives. I had a question for them, also: when they come to take over our jobs, would they rather inherit a selective or a complete collection of TV material? The answer was: a selective one, but only if it is well documented.
Our conferences are not usually ones to produce "results", but this year we can point to one particular outcome. We spend most of our time discussing our main challenges, but this year we attempted, in a workshop organised by Jean-Marc Bordes of INA, to categorise and quantify those challenges. Those present voted on the relative importance of ten main challenges facing television archives and here, in the traditional reverse order, are the results.
10th - the integration of high definition materials
9th - storage capacity and CPU power
8th - the preservation of material available on the web
7th - the massive increase in storage and migration requirements
6th - the massive increase in outlets to serve
5th - tracking the use of material circulating on the web
Equal 3rd came the problem of the retirement of staff with archive-specific knowledge and that of too much content to browse when accessing collections. The second most pressing problem for our members, is the phenomenon of the transition of archives from memory to vestiges, as the oldest parts of our collections become things outside the direct experience of the viewing public.
But FIAT/IFTA members regard the greatest challenge facing them as coping with maintaining the quality of documentation in the face of so much material coming in, and voted this problem the greatest by a very clear margin.
So, now we know what we need to talk about in our future conferences and, on that point, I will hand back to Emmanuel.
FIAT near future is a busy one. In the forthcoming 2 months, the FIAT agenda includes 4 important events :
In 2006, the FIAT annual conference will be hosted by the University Carlos Tercero de Madrid at the end of October. I would like to thank the rector of the University for his invitation. I would like also to introduce his representatives, Gemma CAMANEZ et Mercedes CARIDAD.
Before leaving the floor to Gemma and Mercedes to make the announcement of the University invitation, I would like to thank again Dan for his excellent hosting and all our partners for the support they have provided.
See everybody at the closing dinner !
New-York, 19th September 2005
Last update : 30/11/05
© 2006 - FIAT/IFTA