Aims and Themes

The main aim of the symposium, organized by the Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland as the institution having the overall management of the Netzwerk Mediatheken in cooperation with the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv, is to make the cultural resource "audiovisual media" more accessible to a broader audience.

Themes

The symposium will discuss the significance of media collections. The perspective of cultural policy and the function of media collections for today's information society will be explored, and related copyright questions discussed.

1. Where and how are which media resources collected and developed?

Finding the "Tageschau" newscasts is relatively easy - it is a matter of checking the archives of the responsible and identifiable broadcaster. Tracking down historical series such as "Raumpatrouille", the famous German Science Fiction of the 60s, is a harder job. Which broadcasting station was in charge? Who would think of checking with Bavaria Ltd. in Geiselgasteig? Or how do you get hold of the HB cigarette commercials featuring their little cartoon man?

Whereas productions transmitted by the public networks and by most commercial ones are registered and looked after in their own archives, films made by business enterprises, regional authorities or private individuals are much harder to find. There is no overall "map", a dilemma that is compounded by the sheer quantity of new AV media production. The list of research problems could be extended endlessly. If the cultural resource called "books" were as hard to track down as AV media, people would have surely given up reading by now. Thus a main aim of the symposium is to point out ways to locate the cultural resource called "AV media".

2. Collecting media resources: how professional is it and what kind of interests govern it?

Many institutions - especially the broadcasting stations - have set up their own archives for archiving media resources. Their main interest in so doing is to back up and document their own editorial and broadcasting work. For understandable reasons, making the material publicly accessible is not a priority task. The work of formal documentary registration and cross-referencing is performed with a high degree of professionalism: research inquiries can yield very good results.

The big central archives of the regional authorities also collect media resources within the terms of their statutory mandate. As a rule, the larger archives have developed highly specialized media archives. Access is granted to "everyone" as a rule - at least according to the federal archive law. Also to be included in this category are the "Landesbildstellen", which are sometimes run independently and sometimes as an integral part of a federal state archive. Serially produced AV media are also collected by libraries, where they are readily available for use by the interested public.

There now exists a multitude of institutions, not easily kept track of, that collect live recordings under specific thematic categories. Thus access to AV media on contemporary history is probably more efficient via the Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, for example, than other institutions, since the media resources there are on file under the special documentation focus of "contemporary history". Retrievability here is especially good, since institutional context-knowledge has been incorporated into the documentary description.

Against this institutional background, the symposium will seek an answer to the question whether non-central stock management with a wide variety of "media centres" - while safeguarding the interests of the broadcasting facilities and/or authors - could not be a model made to order for the cultural resource called "media": to preserve, to develop and exploit them, and to keep them on ready reference for the interested public. Another benefit of this model is that it would make it possible to answer the often-posed question of which AV productions are fit for future preservation. The great number of institutions with thematic focal points would be just the right ones to undertake this work of selection. These collections of reproduced media resources would thus supplement the major media resource collections of the broadcasting archives and could substantially relieve them by taking over services offered the public.

3. Which quality standards apply in resource registration and exploitation?

Documenting AV media is done today via digital databanks. The big archives have developed complex documentation conventions for this purpose. The question to be asked is: To what extent can these conventions serve as prototypes for other institutions, and does it seem possible to find a common standard? Against this background, the symposium will also explore the question whether "crossover research" - research using several databanks simultaneously - is useful and desirable. Or is it the thematically and/or institutionally prestructured access via databanks of specialized facilities which can be expected to yield the more exact clusters of hits?

4. Does a clash exist between copyrights and performance rights on the one hand, and interest in broader access to media on the other?

Copyright protection is a primary legal right that has been strengthened in recent years by statutory amendments. All efforts to develop and make accessible the cultural resource called "AV media" must always be governed by the principle that the rights of broadcasting stations and media producers are to be observed, including payment of due compensation. The symposium will therefore also address the question whether, while safeguarding these interests, there are legal, economic, and technical ways to create broad access to AV media. There are legal ways consisting for example in corresponding cooperation agreements - regulating specific use - between broadcasting stations and information institutions. Thus the Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, with its facilities in Bonn and Leipzig, obtained rights from WDR Radio & TV for the public use of the "Zeitzeichen" radio series in its information centre. Flat-rate compensation arrangements are also conceivable. New technological safeguards against unauthorized use and reproduction could also be considered, such as digital watermarks for AV media. The German National Broadcasting Archives (DRA) are currently carrying out a pilot project.

These questions are to be addressed by comparing the international situation with the situation in the Federal Republic of Germany. The countries used in the comparison have been chosen according to such criteria as "federal system" (for example, Germany), centralist system (France) and market size (USA).

The symposium aims are:

• To heighten awareness of the importance of the cultural resource called "AV media".
• To survey the present state of AV development and exploitation in Germany.
• To suggest ways of linking the interests of authors and users.
• To present the "Netzwerk Mediatheken" as a model capable of addressing these tasks.

Conference languages are German and English.

The findings are to be summarized in a publication.