Information Bulletin no. 31, October 1999

New Executive Board elected in Vienna

The new IASA Executive Board elected during the Annual Conference in Vienna is:

Full addresses and contact numbers for Board members will be given in the next IASA Journal.

Biggest half-yearly increase in IASA membership?

That the Vienna conference attracted more IASA members than ever before was partly due to the centenary celebrations but was also a reflection of the recent and numerous influx of new members. A special welcome, therefore to:

Bournemouth University Library
Dorset BH12 5BB, U.K.

Dr. Tjeerd de Graaf
Goudsbloemweg 9, NL - 9765 HP Paterswolde, The Netherlands
Dr. de Graaf is a phonetics & ethnolinguistics researcher.

Joerg Houpert ( sustaining member)
Houpert Digital Audio, Fahrenheitstrasse 1, D - 28359 Bremen
Germany
Houpert Digital Audio produces digital equipment for preservation and restoration of recorded sound.

Dr. Herfrid Kier
In der Huette 2, D - 53909 Zuelpich-Niederelvenich, Germany
Dr. Herfrid Kier is a lecturer in Music at the University of Cologne.

Latvijas Zinatnu Akademijas, Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art Akademijas Laukums 1, LV - 1050 Riga, Latvija
The institute holds the Folklore Archive with sound and audiovisual documents

Lithuanian Archives of Image and Sound (LAIS)
Mr. Dalius Zizys, Director, O. Milasiaus 19, LT 2016 Vilnius, Lithuania
LAIS is responsible for safeguarding the national audiovisual heritage.

Dan MacCarthy
RTE Cork, 5 Aldergrove, Highfield West College Road
Cork, Ireland

Jerry Madsen
4624 West Woodland Road, Edina, Minnesota 55424-1553, U.S.A.
Record collector, ARSC member

Philip G. Moores
Fillanne, Old Weston Road, Bishops Wood, Stafford, ST19 9AG, U.K.
Interested in the collection and preservation of historical recordings of classical pianists and conductors.

Museum of the Jewish Diaspora
Mr. Joel J. Cahen, Deputy Director-General, POB 39359, Tel Aviv 61392, Israel
Beth Hatefutsoth is the main IASA contact. She deals with the audiovisual documentation of the past and present of the Jewish diasporas.

Music Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Arts
Qiao Jianzhong, Director, Dong Zhi Men Wai, Xin Yuan Li, West Building no.1, Beijing 100027, China
The institute is responsible for collecting, recording, storage and classification of China's traditional, folklore and contemporary music.

ORF Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, Hoerfunk-Archiv
Argentinierstrasse 30a, A - 1040 Vienna
Contact: Richard Goll

Dr. Armgard Schiffer
Rotmoosweg 25, A - 8045 Graz, Austria
Dr. Armgard Schiffer retired this year from the Landesmuseum Joanneum. She is still interested in all sound archiving matters.

Chris A. Strachwitz
Arhoolie Records, 10341 San Pablo Avenue, El Cerito, CA 94530, U.S.A.
Chris Strachwitz is concerned with vernacular regional music traditions, discography and collection of records.

Timothy Tapfumaneyi
Library supervisor c/o Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation
Radio Three Music Library, Box HG 444, Highlands.Harare, Zimbabwe

In memoriam Dietrich Lotichius (1924 - 1999)

Ulf Scharlau

Remembering Dietrich Lotichius means for me a glance back over 30 years of a hearty and confident association. We met for the first time in June 1969 in his office at NDR Hamburg, which was followed by numerous pleasant and stimulating meetings and talks in Hamburg, in Stuttgart or at different radio stations in Germany or at venues abroad where IASA or IAML held their annual conferences. In 1969 my career was just starting: Dietrich Lotichius, however, was at that time already an experienced and expert sound archivist. It was said that he knew the answer to any professional question which might arise. And so he did!

The man I encountered was obviously very active and high-spirited: he also had a kind of juvenile outlook. I sensed immediately the benevolence he felt towards a young colleague in need of advice. I always felt confident of being safe when following his advice. For many years Dietrich Lotichius held important offices within the group of radio archivists of the German Public Radio Group (ARD). We admired his ability to manage difficult negotiations. He always concentrated strongly on the aims which he believed to be the right ones. But at the same time he tolerated opinions differing from his own without becoming upset.

The biography of young Dietrich Lotichius was to a great extent determined by the Second World War which forced him, like many of his generation in other countries, to abandon any personal plans. He had to become a soldier and - maybe luckily - he was captured early on by the British. Being able to speak English, the young prisoner of war (POW), who had no political agenda to pursue, was ordered from the POW camp in St. Albans into one of the special record archives of the BBC in London. Here he had to catalogue recordings from German Nazi radio which had been brought to England when the war was over. Dietrich’s control officer in charge was Timothy Eckersley, who later became the head of the BBC Sound Archives. This commission can undoubtedly be seen as the launch of Dietrich’s future career. After his release he returned to Hamburg and thanks to the experience he obtained at the BBC he started working at Radio Hamburg, which later became Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR). In 1954 he was appointed head of the sound archives of that institution.

There is no doubt that Dietrich Lotichius was deeply influenced by the time he spent in England as a POW: he was fascinated by, even in love with, the country, its people and the English language. His sympathy towards English attitudes, feelings and life style, in my opinion, formed the basis for Dietrich’s second area of professional engagement, his active involvement with international bodies, especially IAML and IASA. Indeed IASA owes its foundation in 1969 to Dietrich Lotichius and to other distinguished sound archivists from several countries, among them also Tim Eckersley, years before his superior, now his close friend.

Within IASA Dietrich was often engaged as a negotiator and skilful diplomat. He provided IASA with a lot of suggestions and ideas which today still inform the association's structure and working routines. It was his proposal to establish a professional Radio Sound Archives Committee which came into existence at the Washington conference in 1983. At the end of the 1980s he founded the History of IASA Committee (HIC) with the aim of collecting and preserving documents which might be important for the historiography of IASA: printed minutes of Board meetings or General Assemblies, conference programmes, manuscripts of speeches of IASA officials, photographs, sound and film documents, and whatever. Although HIC does not exist any longer as a committee, it is thanks to Dietrich Lotichius that IASA can now refer to a large collection of material from its first twenty years. Finally, from 1984 to 1987 Dietrich served as a Vice President in the Executive Board of IASA over which I had the honour to preside. When he retired from this office at the end of the Amsterdam conference he was unanimously appointed an Honorary Member of the association.

Yet another area is to be mentioned which was of an utmost importance for Dietrich: he loved and practised music all his life. During the Stockholm IAML/IASA conference in 1986, which was held in the conservatory of music, bored by the papers and the usual conference events Dietrich and I decided to refresh our minds and mood by playing music. We managed to find string instruments and scores in the basement of the institution and by recruiting an English colleague as a viola player and a Norwegian lady as the first violin we formed a string quartet. Dietrich played second violin, I played cello: and so we played Haydn and Mozart string quartets for a couple of hours, during which time several delegates came to listen. I am sure if we had attended the sessions we would have forgotten long ago what had been presented but this improvised rehearsal of a joint IAML/IASA string quartet we never forgot.

Some months ago I succeeded in persuading Dietrich to attend this year’s conference in Vienna. In fact he decided to come, accompanied by his wife Ellen, in order to meet again their friends and colleagues of former days who came to celebrate together with today’s IASA membership the association’s thirtieth birthday. Regrettably his plans were again interrupted. Dietrich Lotichius, who had suffered seriously from heart disease for some time, died on August 21st this year. At the memorial service which took place in the 400-year-old church of Hamburg-Bergedorf, where Dietrich lived, I was asked to commemorate Dietrich as a friend and a colleague. I expressed to his wife and his family the condolences of both the German radio archive colleagues and the membership of IASA. I am sure IASA will keep the memory of Dietrich Lotichius with gratitude.

Happy birthday in Vienna

Those of you who received the special celebration issue of the Information Bulletin in August but who could not make the Phonogrammarchiv’s 100th birthday celebrations in Vienna last month may be curious to know how those celebrations went.

The formal celebrations took place against a background of fervent socialising: the newest members from countries such as Cuba, Estonia, Latvia, China, Albania, Ireland, Papua New Guinea and Rumania were introduced to the current hard-core IASA and AGAVA delegates while some of these were meeting, perhaps for the first time, founder members Rolf Schuursma and Israel Adler. The actual birthday celebration was hosted by the parent organisation, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and held in the Academy’s magnificently ornate and capacious main hall. A large number of distinguished Austrian guests complemented the IASA and AGAVA conference delegates and filled the hall almost to capacity. They heard speeches from Karl Schlögl (Vice-President of the Academy), Sven Allerstrand (President of IASA), Joie Springer (representing the Director General of UNESCO) and the Phonogrammarchiv’s Director, Dietrich Schüller, who claimed that the present generation of archivists had "done nothing" and owed everything to the Phonogrammarchiv’s pioneers. Interspersed with the speeches were short extracts from significant recordings made by the Phonogrammarchiv from 1907 (Arthur Schnitzler) to this year (a recording of a Strauss waltz). The power and quality of some of the selections from the years in between (notably the working song of women from Nuristan) showed that perhaps Dietrich Schüller was being over-modest in his claim.

But the star turn of the evening was by the Director of the Österreichischen Phonothek, Gabriele Zuna-Kratky, who disappeared from view behind the podium during her good-humoured speech for several suspense-inducing seconds to emerge with a small birthday cake bedecked with a single but very large candle: this was presented with great charm to the deservedly proud Director of the Phonogrammarchiv.

Following the speeches, the party adjourned to a hall downstairs for drinks and a buffet, and mingled amongst an attractively presented and informative exhibition which traced the Phonogrammarchiv’s history and activities.

Yesterday’s future in Singapore

Next year’s IASA Conference will be held July 3rd - 7th, together with SEAPAVAA. The official invitations will be sent out early in the new year but a number of details can already be revealed in order to encourage you to attend IASA’s first trip to the Far East.

The overall theme of the conference is A future for the past. A number of themes have been decided which will form the basis for the plenary sessions: copyright issues; digital transfer priorities; selection; metadata; digital collection management; formats and obsolescence; and a session on the local situation in Singapore. Given the distance most delegates will have to travel, the main conference will revert to five days including (for IASA) the two General Assemblies. Sessions will all be joint IASA/SEAPAVAA events. IASA Committee and Section interests will be dealt with across the five days during normal conference proceedings.

IASA travel and research grants

Members are invited to apply for travel grants for assistance to attend the Singapore Conference in July.

The purposes of the travel grants are to encourage active participation at the IASA annual conferences by those who have no alternative funding and to encourage continuing participation in the work of IASA.

Individuals submitting requests are required to be currently paid-up members of IASA and willing to participate in the work of IASA. Your application will be strengthened if you can demonstrate that such participation is current or planned.

IASA Committees and Sections may also consider bringing members from less developed countries to join the conference and share their experiences.

The IASA Board has recently agreed new guidelines for the awarding of travel grants. You are asked to consider these carefully before making your application.

1. While the aim of IASA shall be to encourage members to attend the annual conference by supporting their travel costs, such support must take account of the current financial health of the Association. Normally, 50% of travel costs (cheapest air or train fare between the applicant’s home and the conference venue) will be met.

2. IASA will, in addition, approach the local conference organisers and request that the grantee’s registration fee be waived. The decision in each case will be up to the conference organiser.

3. Accommodation and subsistence costs will not be supported.

4. Applications must be sent in writing (by letter, fax or e-mail) to the Secretary-General in response to the announcement of travel and research grants which are published in the IASA Information Bulletin.

5. Applications by representatives of institutional members must be countersigned by the director or a senior officer of their organisation as evidence that their attendance has been authorised.

6. The method of payment shall be specified in the application including to whom moneys shall be paid and how they will be made.

7. The Secretary-General will check all applications received by the appointed deadline and will submit them to the Executive Board at its mid-year meeting for discussion and approval.

8. Applicants will be informed as soon as possible of the result after the Board’s decision has been reached.

9. IASA will not pay grants in advance of travel. Costs will be reimbursed on presentation of copies of the travel documents by the grantee to the IASA Treasurer during the conference.

10. IASA travel grants are awarded only to members of the Association; grants will not be made in support of accompanying persons.

Applications for travel grants to attend the Singapore conference should preferably be received by the Secretary General of IASA by the end of December 1999 in order to be considered at the mid-year Board meeting to be held in January 2000 but because of the short timescale leading up to next year’s Board meeting, applications may still be made up until the end of February. Please send your application to: IASA Secretary General, Albrecht Häfner, Suedwestrundfunk, Sound Archives, D-76522 Baden-Baden, Germany, Fax +49 7221 929 2094.

Research grants are also available to assist in carrying out specific projects and these are always open for application. Anyone planning a project which concerns the interests of IASA and which requires start-up funding or which requires financial support for work already underway is invited to apply to the Secretary General in writing (see address above). Applications will be considered as and when the Board of IASA meets, so the next opportunity will be at its mid-year meeting in January and then at Annual Conference in July.

ARSC to join IASA for the 2001 Annual Conference

The Executive Boards of IASA and ARSC are pleased to announce that the London conference scheduled for September 23-26 in 2001 will be a joint conference between the two organisations. This will be the first time that ARSC has met outside of North America.

The last IASA conference to be held jointly with ARSC was in Washington 1995 and it was clear that members from both organisations enjoyed the additional choice and range of conference sessions provided. London is an appropriate venue for ARSC since it has a number of active European members. The partnership is considered to have many advantages for both organisations and the extra input from ARSC to the organisation and content of the conference is most welcome.

IASA Directory 2000 contacts

The next edition of the IASA Directory is already in preparation for publication in March next year. Please be sure to notify The Editor, if you have not already done so, of any changes to the information which appears in the 1998 Directory.

This next instruction applies to institutional members. In view of the evidence from the recent elections that voting papers appear not to be reaching the most appropriate IASA contact person in the larger member institutions, if anyone at all, please take a careful look at the entry for your institution in the 1998 Directory and see whether or not a valid contact name has been registered. If not, please supply a name to me, the Editor: this information will be added to the IASA labels list for future mailings.

IASA Cataloguing Rules

Copies of the IASA Cataloguing Rules were delivered to IASA by the printers at State & University Library, Aarhus in September, just in time for the Vienna conference and many delegates took the opportunity to purchase copies at the conference.

The new IASA Treasurer is now finalising the most cost-effective method for ordering and paying for copies by post. The price has been set at 40 U.S. dollars but it is likely that the most suitable payment method for IASA’s new account held in Finland will be in Euros. An announcement and order form will be included in forthcoming IASA publications. However, you may place an order for a copy, to be paid for later, by writing or sending a fax to Magdalena Cséve at:

Hungarian Radio, Documentation, Bródy Sandor u.5-7,
H-1800 Budapest, Hungary.
Fax 36 1 328 8310

The on-line version of the rules will be available from the end of October at the iasa website.

BBC Sound Archive boost

London, October 11th, and hundreds of people from the media, archive and library community queued up on a warm evening outside BBC Broadcasting House to file into the launch of The year of the BBC Archive, an event held at the permanent BBC Experience exhibition in order to demonstrate how the organisation will lead its information and archives into the next century. The BBC is investing many millions of pounds in preservation projects. Most of the money is going towards new digital technology for the Sound Archive. New systems include a digital picture archive, audio and video direct to the desks of BBC programme makers and on-line news information (NEON) . It also includes delivery of "60,000 digitally mastered mood-music tracks", which some might regard as disappointing given the BBC’s reputation for nurturing and presenting music of high quality.

Speeches were heard from the Vice Chairman of the BBC Board of Governors, Baroness Young of Old Scone and senior BBC executives including Paul Fiander, Head of Information and Archives. A number of distinguished guests were invited including Brian Lang (Chief Executive of the British Library), John Woodward (British Film Institute), Denis Frambourt (INA), Crispin Jewitt (President of IASA) and Peter Dusek (President of FIAT).

Keeping tracks on the internet (or California dreaming)

As the indecs project (http://www.indecs.org/ reported in IASA Bulletin 29) approaches its launch conference (Names, numbers and networks) in Washington on 15th November, having succeeded in winning widespread consensus for its model tools and standards for e-commerce, the various companies around the globe that might be persuaded to buy into their ideas have been busy buying each other. Good and reliable sources for news of these developments which, sooner or later, will impact on the work of any sound archive involved in the collection of commercially produced recordings, are the websites for Billboard, Webnoize and Intertrust.

Billboard http://www.billboard.com/ provides an informed weekly commentary on events relating to the Anglo-American music industry (mostly the popular music industry) as they unfold in its Sites + Sounds which covers the convergence of new technologies and the music industry. Of special interest (noted by IASA’s new Treasurer, Pekka Gronow) was the article "Online Music Sector is Evolving" in the July 24th 1999 issue.

Webnoize http://www.webnoize.com/ based in Los Angeles is a good place for news about developments in the new media music industry. It appears to be updated on a daily basis. One of the recent items, as this Bulletin went to press, concerned the Music Business 2005 (MB5) conference held at the Ex'pression Center for New Media in Emeryville, California, http://www.mb-5.com/ which examined how music delivery formats, record labels and media convergence will look five years from now.

Intertrust http://www.intertrust.com/ (also based in California) covers a much broader spectrum of interests than the above though the recording and music industries (with clear American bias) are a small but not insignificant part. It publishes an on-line journal The Industry Standard available at http://www.thestandard.net/. New issues appear quarterly, it seems, but more recent news items on e-commerce concerns are tagged on to the pages. The June 1999 issue, for instance, contained a useful table of recent mergers and deals between some of the major players among which IASA members should note especially the purchase by the internet provider Lycos of Sonique. Lycos, which has a current base of 32 million users a month, is aware that as many as 50 percent of its users are looking for music on their site, therefore it made good business sense to provide them also with a player. Lycos has also signed with DMX, a subsidiary of cable company TCI's Liberty Digital, to provide thirty new radio channels. It will also be offering digital downloads, putting it in competition with sites like MP3.com, Tunes.com and Rioport.com. Hitherto the aim of Lycos has been to act as a "meta-aggregator for text-based content", like news. Soon they will also become an aggregator for recorded music. Lycos, from the UK, is found at http://www.lycos.co.uk/.

Meanwhile, keep an eye (and ear) on the web pages for the conference which took place in Los Angeles in early September. Organised by First Conferences Ltd, Digital Distribution and the Music Industry ‘99 was included some of the most important names and products in the business, and some of the presentations can be heard or viewed, provided you have the correct facilities on your browser. Take a look, anyway, at http://www.firstconf.com/digitalmusic/

The Editor would welcome any information about similar sources of information from the non English-speaking world. A further selection of informative websites is given, as usual in the Sites and Sounds section below.

Oxford’s digital scope

IASA readers might be puzzled at the mention in a IASA publication of a report from Oxford University but Oxford has consistently pushed forward the frontiers of the science of digitization of large-scale collections in all media and the final report by Stuart Lee Scoping the Future of the University of Oxford’s Digital Library Collections (funded by the A. W. Mellon Foundation) could well prove useful to those of you who are contemplating or engaged in the planning of major digitization initiatives. Particularly useful will be the summary recommendations and some of the appendices covering business plans and models (also including financial summaries), digitization methods, metadata and copyright.

The report can be read at http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/scoping/report.html

Z39.50 overview

Only a short while ago Z39.50 was the label to quote if you wanted to impress colleagues in documentation and reader services communities. What was once an American standard (ANSI/NISO Z39.50-1995) governing interoperability between distinct databases has become the matching international standard ISO 23950:1998. People have not stopped talking or writing about it. In Paul Miller’s excellent overview available through the most recent issues of the on-line journal Ariadne at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/z3950/intro.html we read that "a basic search for the term on 6 September [1999] produced a daunting 2,863 hits from Alta Vista, a scary 23,002 from Northern Light, and a positively mind-numbing 27,651 from FAST".

Paul Miller (currently the Interoperability focus for UKOLN - http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/) has returned to the basics about what Z39.50 does and illustrates this with some successful applications of the present day, including the UK’s Arts and Humanities Database Service (AHDS) and the California Digital Library known as Melvyl. He ends by explaining how the standard works. Z39.50 is notoriously opaque for trainees but Paul Miller has succeeded in bringing some much- needed transparency to the subject.

Sites and sounds

This short-list of sound-related sites was recently received from IASA Treasurer, Pekka Gronow:

http://www.audible.com/ is the address for Audible Inc’s growing selection of "audiobooks, comedy routines, news programs, lectures, historical audio clips, public radio shows, etc., which can be streamed or downloaded to a PC. Tune into http://www.audiohighway.com/ for Audiohighway’s internet radio selection of Pop, Rock, Alternative, R&B, Jazz, and World Music. http://www.audiobookclub.com/ claims to offer the largest selection of audio books, while http://www.mp3.com/ is already a well-known provider of a wide range of recordings of all musical genres.

- http://www.cddb.com/ is where to find "the world’s largest on-line database of audio CD information" and could emerge as a source for content metadata for sound archives. With a CDDB-enabled CD Player, downloadable from their CD Players section, each time you play a CD, your computer can access CDDB through the Internet for information about that specific disc. CDDB has data on all kinds of music, even CDs with multiple pressings.

- Michigan State University is planning an on-line collection of historical audio recordings which will make available over the internet 50,000 hours of interviews and speeches to researchers, students, and "anyone interested in the intonations, pauses, and coughs of history". The National Science Foundation (of America) announced this year a $3.6-million grant to the university to build the National Gallery of the Spoken Word. The on-line gallery will offer a broad range of material, including the first cylinder recordings by Thomas Edison, the voices of Babe Ruth and Florence Nightingale, and interviews by Studs Terkel. The IASA Newsdesk has been unable to trace a website but an abstract of the project can be viewed at http://www.nsf.gov/cgi-bin/showaward?award=9817485

Editor’s postscript

It gives me great pleasure to serve another three years as the Editor for IASA. The main aim of the last three years was to deliver a new set of designs as well as to maintain a flow of useful information about the Association and about developments in those areas which are of interest to it. I am delighted that the new design of this Bulletin has met with general approval and I have relayed this to the British Library Corporate Design Office who were largely responsible for enabling the changes.

The main aim of the next three years is to improve the coverage of news items which appear in this Bulletin. This particular issue contains a large amount of news generated by IASA itself but I am aware that the rest has mostly been derived by me from exploring the internet and this is not necessarily the best way to compile an issue which will be of interest to members in all countries, particularly where internet culture may not have arrived. What I propose from the next issue onwards is to circulate a prompt by e-mail to a select group of members (they do not yet know who they are, but I know who most of them will be) asking for new items for inclusion. If there is no news to report then I can always fall back on my current news gathering methods.

There have been suggestions that more images and graphics should be included. We proved with the Special Information Bulletin in the summer that high quality monochrome images could be accommodated easily into the format. However, I will be relying on you, the readers, to supply such images along with your news items. These can be sent as prints or negatives for scanning or as digital images in GIF or TIFF formats (though to be certain that these are of sufficiently high quality for printing they must be above 750Kb in size).

Calendar of events

This Information Bulletin was 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 32 BY 15 DECEMBER 1999