IASA membership fees 2001

With reference to the decision taken by the IASA Executive Board and the General Assembly at the annual conference in Singapore, July 2000, please note the following changes in membership fees as of January 2001.

The only permitted currencies for bank transfer are US-Dollar ($) or Euro (€). Therefore the current fees will be converted from British Pound Sterling (GBP ?) into US-Dollar ($) and Euro (€). From January 2001 these currencies will be used exclusively for invoicing and reminders.

The key currency is the US$. Membership fees will be determined with reference to the actual currency rates, but this does not mean that the fees for 2001 have been increased in comparison to 2000. Fees shown on the invoices for 2001 will be based on the exchange rate of 30 December 2000 and will remain valid for the whole year 2001.

As the bank fees charged to both the IASA Treasury and IASA members are rather high, from January 2001 IASA will introduce discounts for advanced payment of membership fees: 5% discount for two years payment, 10% discount for three years payment.

All figures calculated with reference to currency exchange rates at December 29th, 2000.

New members

National Library Board, Singapore. Library Supply Centre, No.3 Changi South Street 2, Tower B #03-00, Singapore 486548.
This is the national and main public library in Singapore.

Arquivo Hist¨®rico de Mo?ambique. Av. Filipe Samuel Magaia No.715 R/C, Maputo, Mozambique.
Serves the public and academic community in Mozambique. The collection covers historical material, public records, audio-visual, oral history, cartography and iconography.

Breda Gray, Irish Centre for Migration Studies, National University of Ireland, Cork, 6 Bloomfield Terrace, Western Road, Cork, Ireland.
This is a research and teaching institution currently developing an oral archive about the effects of emigration on Irish society in the 20th century and accounts of Irish identity and experiences in the Diaspora.

Ross Harvey, School of Information Studies, Charles Sturt University, Locked Bag 675, Wagga Wagga, NSW 2678, Australia.
Ross Harvey teaches a graduate diploma in audio-visual archiving.

Sa¨²l Mat¨¦ (associate member). PO Box 264, Salford, M6 6JL, United Kingdom.
Student of audio technology.

ARSC-IASA Annual Conference, London: second call for papers

The deadline for the first call for papers (see Information Bulletin No.35) has now passed. This is the second call for papers on the theme Why collect? The purpose of audiovisual archives. See Information Bulletin No.35 for more information. Proposals for a paper or poster presentation should be sent in the form of a title and summary along with your name and address to one of the programme committee:

John Spence, IASA Vice-President: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Archives, G.P.O. 9994, Sydney, NSW 2001, Australia. Fax 011 61 2 9333 2525, email spence.john@a2.abc.net.au
Alan Ward: The British Library National Sound Archive, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB, United Kingdom. Fax + 44 20 7412 7441, email alan.ward@bl.uk
Dr Michael Biel, ARSC 2nd V.P.: P.O. Box 822, Morehead, Kentucky 40351, United States. Email m.biel@morehead-st.edu

The deadline for this call is March 15.

Full details of the conference and a provisional programme will soon be posted at the ARSC-IASA Conference website, which is linkable from the ARSC and IASA websites respectively.

IASA travel and research grants reminder

There is still time to submit applications for travel and research grants. The deadline is the end of February 2001. See details in Information Bulletin No.35.

ALB changes its name

Sweden's ALB has changed its name as of January 1 2001 to Statens Ljud-och Bildarkiv.

Sven Allerstrand writes: "the acronym will be SLBA. We hope to avoid using the acronym in Swedish, and instead use the short form: Ljud- och bildarkivet, which in English means the sound and picture archive. The postal address, telephone, fax etc will be the same but we are changing the visiting address to Karlav?gen 98. The url will be http://www.ljudochbildarkivet.se and my e-mail address will accordingly be sven.allerstrand@ljudochbildarkivet.se."

Andorra's memory for the world

Cinta Pujal (Arxiu Hist¨°ric Nacional d'Andorra) reports:

"We are glad to report that the National Historical Archive of Andorra, attached to the Ministry of Tourism and Culture of the Andorran Government, has received the support of UNESCO for carrying out its campaign Recovery of Andorra's Film Heritage, a Task of All. This project, which will be unfolding over the course of the years 2000 and 2001, is set within the UNESCO Memory of the World programme.

Our work is organised in three phases. In the first phase we need to carry out a promotion and information campaign on the project, contacting collaborators and obtaining film documents.

Secondly, we will evaluate these documents and the respective treatments in accordance with the state of preservation and the particular features of the contents. One copy will be made for conservation, which will be deposited at the National Historical Archive, and another copy for domestic use will be delivered to the owner. These documents will be inventoried and catalogued by the international cataloguing system and rules on audio-visual archives.

In the third phase we will disseminate the documents. The dissemination of the project will be carried out in step with the completion of the various phases. We will exhibit the first results as soon as possible, holding an amateur and domestic cinema exhibition in collaboration with the Andorran Cinema Club Cine Club de les Valls, and organising in the medium term a seminar with the participation of the persons in charge of the programme, professionals from the audio-visual archives field and the owners of the documents. We wish to achieve a broader dissemination by using all the technological advances at our disposal, by taking part in congresses and seminars inside and outside our country, and by making known this initiative as widely as possible: a good way to acknowledge the historical heritage is to disseminate it.

The goal is to grant a well-deserved acknowledgement to all the protagonists (film-makers and persons filmed) who, on an amateur or domestic basis, have been present at some scene of our history, and to share with society at large these unique testimonies. We will work together - institutions, associations and individuals - to recover and enhance the appreciation of Andorra's film heritage, and to make known the existence of these documents in national and international spheres as a small contribution to making a reality of the programme Memory of the World.

We wish to express our gratitude to the collaborating organisations (RTVA, STA and Diari d'Andorra) and to the institutions and individuals who have given us support since the time when this project was only an idea. Furthermore, if you have filmed images of the Principality of Andorra or if you know of anyone who may possess any and would be interested in having them form part of a programme of international scope backed by UNESCO that is based on disseminating part of the Memory of the World, we urge you to contact us by telephone (00-376 86-05-06) or through our web site http://www.andorra.ad/arxius

Preserving Endangered Language Heritage Project

The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) is being funded for three years through the Federal Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission Language Access Initiatives Program, to undertake much needed work on its recorded sound collection.

The aim of the project is to improve access to language material in the AIATSIS recorded sound collection by:

• increasing the number of audiotapes that have documentation;

• archiving the backlog of original field tape recordings of which there is currently only one copy in existence;

• preparing comprehensive compilation tapes of specific languages for return to the appropriate intellectual property owners.

• The Federation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Languages (FATSIL) is advising which languages should be given priority, as most Australian languages could be considered 'endangered'.

IASA President in New York

IASA President Crispin Jewitt reports on his attendance at the UN World Television Forum 2000.
"I attended this conference on 16-17 November at the United Nations HQ primarily on behalf of IASA, but also with a view to the British Library's general interest in broadcasting developments in the context of e-services and of the National Sound Archive. My IASA remit was to represent the interests of the audio-visual archiving profession, and the preservation of TV and radio material as cultural heritage for the wider research community.

The theme of the conference was Bridging the digital divide and it brought together major players in the media industry with NGOs and high-technology companies for two days of contrasting but stimulating sessions, addressing issues such as the role of broadcasting in social programmes, and the changing relationship between TV, radio and the internet.

The opening sessions included a welcome by the President of the General Assembly, Harri Holkeri, and a keynote event which included presentations by Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General, and Greg Dyke, Director General of the BBC. Kofi Annan drew our attention to the link between civilisation and knowledge, and the consequential moral and social responsibility to share knowledge to reduce inequalities. While saying that the broadcasting industry could be an agent for change in this area, he also urged that the spread of basic literacy should not be forgotten as a necessary basic task. He announced the establishment of a UN Task Force on Bridging the Digital Divide. Greg Dyke spoke in support of the principle of public service broadcasting funded by the public purse (acknowledging with humour that in some quarters in the USA this practice was thought akin to communism).

Two particular issues of relevance to IASA arose from the sessions on education and on "the radio model". Philip Karp from the World Bank made an interesting presentation on their distance learning programmes for adult in-service training. Using a range of media including the web, video-conferencing, data links and even old-fashioned television programming, complemented by a network of local learning centres the World Bank is backing up its lending programmes with professional skills transfer around the globe. IASA has been discussing distance learning, and although the World Bank clearly has more resources at its disposal, there is much that could be learnt from this programme about effective methodologies for delivery. Another session looked at the different ways in which radio and TV were interacting with and using the Internet to develop new services. Radio was considered much more responsive to the agendas of local populations and there were examples from Latin America and East Asia of complementary use of Internet news services and local radio. There was also a presentation on the UN's own use of radio as a platform for promoting its programmes world-wide http://www.un.org/av/radio. The fact that radio was much more hospitable to linguistic differences than TV was said to be an additional factor which would secure the future of radio as a medium with its own distinct position in the overall broadcasting industry. Radio is also inexpensive for the consumer and not dependent on mains electricity (which was a sentiment of little relevance to the following session about the digital vision). In this session there was naturally no consistent message from the panel, but there were solidly practical contributions from the Polish and Kenyan speakers, theoretical and visionary statements from the Italian speakers, and a strong message from the US participant no doubt quite unrelated to his current business interests. Ayisi Makatiani, the Kenyan speaker, runs a successful business which is addressing the issue of "information inequality" by providing Internet services to ordinary people in a country where the infrastructure we take for granted hardly exists. David Passero, who runs the webcasting service of RAI, pointed to the inevitable loss of control over schedules, and the fundamentally changing relationship between viewer (actor rather than spectator) and broadcaster.

The conference mainly addressed the interaction between business, technological, and social developments, and there was thus only limited overlap with specific IASA agendas, but it obviously raised very important general issues for archivists of broadcast material. There is no doubt that AV archiving has a most important role to play in documenting the process of change and preserving the cultural artefacts generated by these activities, but whether current archival structures are adequate to the task is a big question.

Amongst others I met Peter Dusek, President of FIAT, and Hugh Leonard, Secretary-General of the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union. It was also good to meet Wolfgang Dehn, a colleague of Albrecht H?fner at S¨¹dwestrundfunk. I believe the conference was good value for money in relation to IASA's AV remit, and also provided the BL with an opportunity to keep abreast of an area which may well become more important to it in the future.

IASA addresses FIAT in Vienna

The following message from the IASA President Crispin Jewitt was conveyed to FIAT's conference in Vienna last October.

"Mr President and Conference Delegates

It is a pleasure to convey the greetings and best wishes of the International Association of Sound and Audio-visual Archives for a successful conference, and to have the opportunity to deliver a message from a neighbouring association.

The interests and membership of our two associations overlap in a number of areas so we naturally look with interest at our relationship to consider where we can co-operate to our mutual advantage. We are constantly reminded about media convergence and of course this is removing previous distinctions, but at the same time we should take account of the differing composition of our respective memberships. FIAT predominantly, though not exclusively, includes broadcasting organisations, while IASA with a much more heterogeneous membership, includes the academic and heritage sectors, as well as broadcasters. Successful co-operation will depend on a realistic understanding of the different agendas that arise from these facts, as much as on the identification of areas of common interest.

We are both small organisations when compared with the peak bodies in the archive, library, and museum world. But we share a common need to influence policy makers and increase awareness of the importance of our work. Too often we find ourselves having to struggle for adequate funding from parent institutions, rather than influencing the wider agenda for the management of our growing audio-visual heritage. As a response to this situation IASA has been working with other associations to set up a more active 'umbrella' organisation to represent the interests and needs of the audio-visual archive profession on the wider stage. The Co-ordinating Council of Audio-visual Archives Associations (CCAAA) is currently being established with robust terms of reference and a realistic level of administrative support. We hope that FIAT will re-join IASA, FIAT, IFLA, and ICA in this new stage of co-operation.

Next year both of our associations will be meeting in London. IASA is meeting with ARSC at the British Library towards the end of September and we have the opportunity to co-ordinate the dates with FIAT for the benefit of delegates who wish to attend both conferences. Our conference theme will be Why collect the purpose of audio-visual archives: we will be reminding ourselves of the value of our work by presenting some of the cultural riches of our holdings, and also looking at ways of developing partnerships to use our limited resources to greater effect.

But all of that is for next year. In the meantime IASA sends you all best wishes for a lively and successful meeting this week in Vienna."

Sven Allerstrand (SLBA and IASA Past President) attended the conference. Here is part of his brief report to the IASA President.

"The FIAT conference went well. The IASA message was well received and as a response they decided to have their conference at the same dates as IASA. They also agreed on having at least one joint social event. We discussed holding this at BBC as this would be accepted as neutral ground: the BBC is a member of IASA and FIAT. FIAT did not respond at all to the IASA President's invitation to rejoin CCAAA.

FIAT business policy still revolves around "the archive as the heart of a production company", but there is a working group within FIAT, the Technical Studies Working group, which deals with television as source material for research and how the TV-archives could be made accessible to academics. I am a member of this group and attended my first meeting in Vienna. Steve Bryant is the chair and the other attendants were from Library of Congress, the Netherlands Audio-visual Archives, the National Archives of Canada, the Swedish Television Company and the Finnish Broadcasting Company. This has a potential to become a National Archives Commission within FIAT if the association wants to broaden its scope to the heritage sector."

More on IASA/FIAT

The annual joint IASA/FIAT meeting will be held at the new archive building of the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv in Potsdam-Babelsberg on 18-19 May 2001.

For further information please contact:
Per Holst, Radio Sound Archives Section, c/o Danish Broadcasting Corporation
Radio Archive, Islands Brygge 81, DK-2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark
E-mail: per@dr.dk, Fax: 45 3520 5568

Managing modern radio sound archives in Asia

IASA's activity in Asia continues. Secretary-General Albrech H?fner recently re-Oriented himself and sent in this report of his lecturing tour in Iran and South-East Asia.

The ABU (Asia & Pacific Broadcasting Union) and the Training Centre of DW (Deutsche Welle, the German international radio) jointly funded and organized a series of workshops on Managing Modern Radio Sound Archives which took place in six Asian countries throughout the whole of October and early November 2000. Deutsche Welle, one of the German public broadcasting companies, organises as part of its mandate, training courses on programming and technical content for radio and television companies in developing countries. These take place either at the Deutsche Welle training centre in Cologne or at clients' sites anywhere in the world. Target groups for this particular series were the big national and private radio companies in the capital cities of each country. The trainees and hosts were IRIB (Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, Tehran), RIB (Republik of Indonesia Broadcasting, Jakarta), Thailand Radio (Bangkok), Radio Guangdong (Guangzhou, China), SLBC (Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, Colombo) and AIBD (Asian & Pacific Institute for Broadcast Development) in Manila in conjunction with the ABU General Assembly.

The workshops were run by a team of three: one colleague from DW who is a radio generalist and who has in-depth knowledge about DW's digital radio services (including the sound archive with its digital mass storage system); an IT and network specialist from ABU; and myself as an expert on modern radio sound archives.

Each workshop lasted three days, covering subjects such as the requirements for modern radio sound archives, archive management, databases for sound archives, computerisation and digitisation, audio workstations, mass storage systems, data reduction, networks, and the like, but also (with regard to existing collections) handling, storage and conservation of audiovisual carriers. A 20-minute presentation on IASA rounded off each workshop.

We used the day prior to the start of each workshop for technical preparation (we preferred our laptops and offered powerpoint presentations via a beamer and a screen) and checks (e.g. in each country we were faced with different plugging-in systems for electrical power) and had talks, too, with the archive staff in order to obtain a rough idea of their situation. The number of attendants ranged between 25 in Colombo and 115 in Bangkok where institutions other than Thailand Radio, e.g. archives from universities and the army, participated.

The situation in each of the archives we visited varied considerably: here several small CD collections scattered in editors' offices without any central structure; there a central sound archive, holding CDs, microgroove records and magnetic tapes as well as lacquer discs and shellacs which had been utilised constantly for more than three years. Here a notebook or, at best, a card catalogue for access; there people transferring data from card catalogues onto an electronic database. Here any amount of dust due to a filterless air conditioning device; there excellent storage conditions with a temperature of 16¡ãC and 40% RH. Here a single unmotivated person in charge of what could only be called an approximation to a sound archive; there a motivated team of ten persons. Here typewriters in the news room; there already some computer equipment for production and on-air systems. Here and there generally, a lack of money for the sound archive. The inescapable conclusion for an indulged European archivist was that there are a great many omissions to make up for and a lot of backlogs to manage.

The aim of the workshop series was to bring new ideas to the participants, in particular to raise awareness of the benefits and inevitability of digitisation. I believe that these new ideas were embraced eagerly and that IASA may soon increase its membership in this region.

AES in Budapest: announcement and call for papers

The AES 20th International Conference Committee invites submission of papers for presentation at its 20th International Conference Archiving, Restoration & New Methods of Recording to be held at the Hotel Novotel, Budapest October 5 7.

"The treasury of accumulated sound recordings held by the recording industry, broadcasters, national collections and research institutions is estimated to be more than 50 million hours. This legacy constitutes an invaluable asset for the future. To preserve it and make it accessible is a challenge to audio engineers, archivists and information technologists. The conference will explore the new horizons opened by recent technological developments in the fields of preservation, restoration and access to sound recording".

The proposed topics for papers are:
Carrier degradation; accelerated ageing tests; carrier and signal restoration; quality assessment of holdings; storage conditions; re-recording historical formats; format obsolescence; mass transfer of large collections; digital mass-storage systems; file structure and metadata; migration issues; automated content analysis; multimedia services; new principles of data recording; rewritable carriers; limits for data density; solid-state memories.

Further information about conference themes can be obtained from either of the conference co-chairs:
G¨¢bor Heckenhast Fax +36 1 384 5704
Dietrich Sch¨¹ller Fax +43 1 4277 9296
Or e-mail 20thconf_cochairs@aes.org

The deadline for submissions is March 1st. Proposals for papers must include provisional title, abstract (60-120 words only) and pr¨¦cis (500-700 words) and should be submitted to the Committee via the Internet at http://www.aes.org/20th_authors . You can visit this site for more information and instructions.

All proposals should be submitted on-line. The pr¨¦cis should describe the work carried out, methods employed and conclusions. Also include your opinion of the paper's significance. Titles and abstracts should follow the guidelines in Information for Authors at http://www.aes.org/journal/con_infoauth.html. Authors without Internet access may contact the AES Headquarters office for hardcopy forms and instructions.

Acceptance of papers (which will be e-mailed by April 15 2001) will be determined by a review committee based on an assessment of the pr¨¦cis. A pre-print manuscript (deadline July 16th 2001) will be a condition for acceptance of the paper for presentation at the conference. Abstracts of accepted papers will be published in the conference programme.

If you have any further questions about these formalities, please contact either of the conference paper co-chairs:
Zolt¨¢n Vajda or Heinrich Pichler at 20th_papers@aews.org

Ethnomusicology meeting in Detroit call for papers

The Society for Ethnomusicology will be holding its 2001 Annual Meeting on October 25-28 at the Marriott Renaissance Center, Detroit, Michigan. The conference theme is Teaching and Learning in the Twenty-First Century. There is also a pre-conference symposium on Transcription and its Futures, which will be held on October 24th.

The deadline for receipt of proposals for papers is March 7, 2001.

For information contact: SEM 2001 Program Committee, Society for Ethnomusicology, Morrison Hall 005, Indian University, Bloomington, IN 47405, United States. E-mail sem@indiana.edu, website http://www.ethnomusicology.org

Sites and Sounds

• New on the National Library of Canada's The Virtual Gramophone: The First World War Era (1914-1918)

• Richard Green (NLC) writes: "The latest phase of development for The Virtual Gramophone Web site has seen the addition of songs from the period of the First World War. The Great War saw an outpouring of patriotic songs and sentimental ballads urging support for soldiers, sailors, and airmen, combined with heart-felt concern for the families waiting on the home front. This era also marked the beginning of great changes in popular music, with the rise of vaudeville, the song writing of Tin Pan Alley, the start of the dance-band craze, and the rise of jazz. Canadian singers and songwriters were leaders of this musical generation.

Visitors to the Virtual Gramophone Web site can consult 724 new records in the database, 268 new digitally-restored audio recordings, and a series of articles and images explaining the period and the music, as well as biographical sketches of the major Canadian musical personalities. Of particular note is the extensive coverage in the Virtual Gramophone for Canada's premier entertainment troupe of that era, the Dumbells."

• Ymgyrchu!: a century of political and social campaigning in Wales

• The National Library of Wales is hosting a suite of new pages devoted to themes such as Welsh politics and the Welsh language and it contains many fascinating sound clips - http://www.llgc.org.uk/ymgyrchu/index.htm

• Pengelly article

• The October 2000 issue of Electronics World contains an article about cylinders. A special associated CD Pandora's box is available separately from Electronics World, Quadrant House, The Quadrant, Sutton, Surrey SM2 2AS, UK at a cost of 11.99 GBP. (This article appears to be available in hard copy only: a visit to the online index http://www.softcopy.co.uk/indexes.htm, where reprints can be purchased, indicates that recent issues (i.e. post May 1998) are not yet available).

• Hangars full of musical printers and other "Weird Stuff".

• The dependence on technology that makes our profession special and problematic requires us to keep and maintain arsenals of machinery. The amount of space required in the near future for this suggests that alternative use might be considered of disused military installations, such as aircraft hangars, to ensure that all formats are covered. The same problem exists for the computer industry but they appear to be several steps ahead of the sound archive community already. I was browsing through web pages for the San Francisco Bay area prior to a Christmas visit and came across two intriguing sites, neither of which I had time to visit in the physical sense. The Computer Museum History Center houses its collection of computing artefacts (including 2000 films and videotapes) in a building at Moffett Federal Airfield. Follow the links at http://www.computerhistory.org/ from "highlights" and discover a bonus item recordings of a 1964 IBM 1403 printer "performing" popular songs of the time. And if you need spare parts in future for obsolete components of your digital mass storage system (e.g. rendering devices), then the Weirdstuff Warehouse http://www.weirdstuff.com may be able to help. [Ed.]

• York Digital Management Conference

• Despite repeated flood warnings during the wettest British Autumn on record, a major conference on digital collection management managed to take place successfully in York, UK last December. You can read about it in RLG News on the Web at
  http://www.oclc.org/en-UK/home.html

• Ugandan music collection

• Gordon Nicol (Uncle Kabuye) invites IASA members to sample the delights of musical performances by Ugandan children recorded by him on New Year's Eve 1999 at Children of Uganda Tour of Light 2000 www.scotchproductions.com/uganda.html
  www.africa.spivideo.com

IASA Directory Erratum

It has been pointed out that IRTEM, although present in the list of institutional members, was omitted from the country index under Italy. The next issue of the Directory is due in early 2002.

REMINDER

Please remember to keep the Editor informed of any changes to the details that appear in the current IASA Directory. ?

Calendar of events

This Information Bulletin has been compiled by

the Editor of IASA, Chris Clark,
The British Library National Sound Archive, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB, UK,
tel. 44 (0)20 7412 7411, fax 44 (0)20 7412 7413, e-mail chris.clark@bl.uk

PLEASE SEND COPY FOR INFORMATION BULLETIN NO 36 BY 15 MARCH 2001