Journal of Film Preservation N° 60/61 - FIAF

cataloguing, acquisition by priority, but the smaller collections have
not. They will first have to seek co-ordination and co-operation
among themselves, and here the rôle of the regional audiovisual
archives and their counterparts (depending on the particular
province) may be a crucial one. Obviously, since they exist and are
experienced, they could effectively co-ordinate the various individual
projects within their regions and present them as a total regional
project. That co-ordination will also imply consultation of the
national institutions, as well as of the National archive branches in
each province, insofar as they develop into more regionally oriented
services. The Royal Association of Archivists has started a year or two
again a Regional Working Group for Audiovisual Archiving, known
under its Dutch initials NORAA, that already offers itself as an
instrument to take up exactly that responsibility. They do now have a
solid base to work on.
Some other co-ordinating activities have already been started. One
priority area for NAA and Film Museum is the creation of a common
standard of cataloguing, a common core thesaurus and eventually a
common data bank for audiovisual media. This activity takes into
account the foreseeable consequences of digitalisation, both for
recent and for historical audiovisual documents. Third parties will be
invited to participate in this project so as to develop a truly national
audiovisual archives data bank that may at the end of the day provide
users with references to other archival data banks in the country,
though it is realistic to observe here that this is not to be achieved
within a fortnight or so. A start has been made with the professional
education and training of audiovisual archivists when an educational
institution known by its Dutch initials GO, submitted a project for
specialist training in physical handling, preservation, inventorising
and cataloguing of audiovisual materials. This project is supported
financially i.a. by the Association and has also the support of the
major archiving institutions. The Dutch Archive School in
Amsterdam has scheduled to start in autumn of 2000 a pilot course
at middle and higher level that will be designed to complement the
GO training course, and is i.a. based on the UNESCO RAMP Study
‘Curriculum development for the training of personnel at moving
images and recorded sound archives’. Following the start of formal
training courses one further development will be to establish
qualification requirements and proper job description guidelines for
personnel working in audiovisual archives.
The 1999 inventory report gives an important and sustained
momentum to audiovisual archiving in the Netherlands and therefore
to archiving in general, as its effects reach well beyond the immediate
issue of preservation itself.
82 Journal of Film Preservation / 60/61 / 2000