Information Bulletin no. 20, January 1997

IASA Website

Iestyn Hughes writes: "The IASA "homepage" should be launched on Monday 27 January 1997. The internet address for the new IASA homepage is [http://www.llgc.org.uk/iasa/index.htm]

Member institutions which have their own URLs are encouraged to send them to Iestyn, by conventional post or by e-mail, so that links may be provided from the IASA pages to their own institutions.

Members wishing to add information about their organisations to the IASA pages must send their contribution as ASCII files, on disc or via e-mail to: R Iestyn Hughes, Assistant Keeper National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, SY23 3BU, U.K. e-mail: iestyn.hughes@llgc.org.uk

IASA Directory

IASA's hard-pressed Editor and Treasurer have finished compiling the replacement for the 1989 Membership List. This will be known as the IASA Directory and will be ready for distribution to all members in February.

New Arrangements for Paying Subscriptions

As members may know, we are continually trying to explore easier and more efficient ways of collecting membership dues. The global spread of membership as well as IASA's relatively small size remains a headache for the Treasurer. However, for 1997, options have been explored which will, in the first instance, make things easier for those IASA members who are also members of ARSC, and particularly those living in North America who do not have the benefit of European GIRO exchange.

With the invoices being sent out in 1997 I have been offering those North American IASA/ARSC joint members the option of mailing their cheques direct to the ARSC Executive Director in the United States: Peter Schambarger, ARSC, P.O. Box 543, Annapolis, MD 21404-0543, USA.

Peter and I and the ARSC Treasurer, Steve Ramm, are discussing mutually beneficial approaches to collecting dues, with the aim of ensuring two things: firstly, to make life a little easier for members; and secondly, to make sure that a higher percentage of membership dues ends up in IASA and ARSC coffers rather than in the banks'.

Travel Grants

Members are invited to apply for travel grants for assistance to attend the Muscat, Oman Conference in October.

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

Funding for grants is limited and they will only cover a proportion of the costs involved.

Proposals for travel grants to attend the Muscat conference must be received by the Secretary General of IASA by 24th February 1997 in order to be considered at the mid-year Board meeting to be held 26-27th February 1997. However, exceptions will be made this year for late applications due to the lateness of this Bulletin. If you know that your application will not be ready in time, please notify the Secretary General of your intention to apply and forward your application as soon as possible after the above deadline. Notification of awards will be sent to applicants during March and April. Please send your application to: IASA Secretary General, Albrecht Häfner, Südwestfunk, Sound Archives, D-76522 Baden-Baden, Germany. Fax 49 7221 92 20 94

Research Grants

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 (address above). Applications will be considered as and when the Board meets, so the next chance will be at the mid-year meeting 26-27th February and then at Annual Conference in October.

October in Muscat

A formal announcement about the next IASA Conference in Muscat, Oman will be made in due course. Those who attended the Conference last year in Perugia will have heard Dr Issam El-Mallah's presentation about this exciting venue but we felt that others might already be in need of some basic information in order, for instance, to bid for financial support to attend.

IASA is on its own this year. The main conference will be held October 4-9; there will be a three-day pre-conference held October 1-3 (involving the Cataloguing Rules Editorial Group) and two additional days October 10-11 have been reserved for IASA Board meetings.

The venue for the Conference is the Oman Centre for Traditional Music which is part of the Ministry of Information and it is expected that Ministry buildings will be available for the various conference meetings.

Dr El-Mallah says that it is still too early to say what the costs will be but he expects it to be cheaper than Perugia.

He adds: "The Sultanate of Oman is a very beautiful country indeed. You can find very old Arabian traditions which have disappeared in most other Arab countries". If the IASA Editor can get the required permission, Dr El-Mallah's article about the Oman Center for Traditional Music, which was published in World of Music vol.33 (1), 1991, will be re-printed in the next issue of the IASA Journal.

International Bioacoustics Council (IBAC)

IBAC was founded in Århus in Denmark in September 1969 to promote international participation in the scientific study of biological sounds, or bioacoustics. Its primary achievement since then has been the organising of fourteen international symposia in nine different European countries. The subject of bioacoustics is really a marriage of the two fields of biology and physical acoustics, and with its dependence on technology, the interdisciplinary nature of IBAC meetings has attracted scientists, amateur sound recordists, archivists and electronic engineers. IBAC has also sponsored the publication of the news bulletin Biophon. In recent years, attempts have been made to develop standards and international co-operation in such areas as analytical measurement, descriptive terminology, recording techniques and archival documentation for bioacoustic recordings.

The last symposium, held in October 1996 in the historic university town of Pavia in northern Italy, was attended by seventy participants from fourteen countries. The programme included a series of spoken papers on the latest research in sounds of insects, whales, fish, mammals and birds, followed by technical discussion and two roundtable sessions on 'audio copyright and licensing' and 'reliability of DAT for archiving'. Just as rewarding were the opportunities for socialising after hours with such a mix of nationalities in the restaurants in the old part of Pavia.

The XVI IBAC Symposium will take place at the Center for Bioacoustics, Texas A&M University, Texas, USA, October 14th-18th, 1997. This will be the first IBAC Symposium to be held in the United States and it is being co-sponsored by the Acoustical Society of America. The IBAC Chairman is currently Dr Gianni Pavan of Pavia University and the Secretary is Richard Ranft, British Library National Sound Archive.

Richard Ranft

WIPO Treaties

This is copied from the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation) Press Release No. 106, Geneva, December 20, 1996.

In Geneva, on December 20, 1996, the WIPO Diplomatic Conference on Certain Copyright and Neighboring Rights Questions adopted two Treaties, namely the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty. Any member State of WIPO may accede to those Treaties.

Both Treaties include provisions which offer responses to the challenges of digital technology, particularly the Internet. They provide an exclusive right for authors, performers and producers of phonograms to authorize the making available of their works, performances and phonograms, respectively, to the public, by wire or wireless means, in such a way that members of the public may access them from a place and at a time individually chosen by them (language which covers on-demand, interactive transmissions in the Internet.) In relation to that right, and the rights of communication to the public, in general, the Conference adopted an agreed statement expressing the understanding that the mere provision of physical facilities for enabling or making a communication does not itself amount to communication. The Treaties contain provisions on obligations concerning technological measures of protection and electronic rights management information, indispensable for an efficient exercise of rights in digital environment. The Conference also discussed whether or not specific provisions are needed concerning the application of the right of reproduction concerning some temporary, transient, incidental reproductions, but did not adopt any such provisions since it considered that those issues may be appropriately handled on the basis of the existing international norms on the right of reproduction, and the possible exceptions to it, particularly under Article 9 of the Berne Convention.

Both Treaties recognize a right of distribution to the public of copies. They leave to national legislation to determine the territorial effect of the exhaustion of rights with the first sale of a copy (and, thus, whether or not parallel import is allowed).

The WIPO Copyright Treaty also contains provisions on the copyright protection of computer programs and original databases and on the right of rental in a way similar to the TRIPS Agreement.

Furthermore, the WIPO Copyright Treaty raises the minimum duration of protection of photographic (which in the Berne Convention now is 25 years) to the duration of protection of other works under the Berne Convention (50 years).

The WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty covers the protection of the rights of performers other than their rights in the audiovisual fixations of their performances, and, in addition to the above-mentioned provisions related to the digital technology, and the provisions on the right of distribution, it also contains protection on other economic rights of performers and producers of phonograms in a more or less similar way as in the 1961 Rome Convention and, as far as the right of rental is concerned, in a way similar to the TRIPS Agreement. The Treaty also recognizes moral rights for performers in respect of their live aural performances and their performances fixed in phonograms.

The minimum duration of protection of the rights covered by the Treaty practically corresponds to the duration under the TRIPS Agreement (50 years) rather than under the Rome Convention (20 years).

The Conference also adopted a resolution expressing regret that, in spite of the efforts of most Delegations, no agreement was reached on the rights of performers in the audiovisual fixations of their performances and calling for the convocation of an extraordinary session of the competent WIPO Governing Bodies in the first quarter of 1997 to decide about the schedule of further preparatory work in view of the adoption of a protocol to the Treaty on such rights, not later than in 1998.

The Conference did not discuss the draft Treaty on Intellectual Property Rights in Databases which would have granted protection also for non-original databases. It adopted a recommendation on the convocation of an extraordinary session of the competent WIPO Governing bodies to decide on the further preparatory work of such a Treaty.

The official texts of the Treaties can be obtained from WIPO in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Spanish and Russian and, are being made available, in English, French and Spanish, on the Internet (http://www.wipo.int).

Tonmeistertagung, Karlsruhe

The 19th Tonmeistertagung (International Convention on Sound Design) was held in Karlsruhe, Germany on November 15-18, 1996.

The Tonmeistertagung is organized by the Education Enterprise of the Association of German Sound Engineers and is a combined convention which offers a programme of papers and lectures dealing with current issues in the sound design field and offers appropriate suppliers and manufacturers the opportunity to exhibit.

The biennial Tonmeistertagung has made Karlsruhe its regular venue. Previous conventions took place there in 1992 and 1994. It has gained more and more international acceptance: of the 184 exhibitors in 1996, 24 were from countries outside Germany, in addition to the numerous international companies which have German branches.

About eighty papers, five round tables, twenty product fora and three excursions dealt with topics from areas such as multi-channel sound, sound reinforcement, digitial techniques, sound quality control and assessment, architectural acoustics, sound design and recording practice, studio design and construction, post-production, computer-aided broadcasting, mass storage and archiving, music acoustics and sound aesthetics, psychoacoustics, etc.

Within the "mass storage and archiving" topic, IASA General Secretary Albrecht Häfner reported on "The digital mass store in broadcasting archives: initial experience at Südwestfunk", and Dietrich Schuller gave a paper on "The problem of transferring analogue archive material in the digital domain", the conclusion of which was that digitization is the "state of thinking ahead". When embarking on the digitization of large collections, usually implying years and years of work, those parts of the collection which deserve preferential transfer must be suitably prioritised. The speaker pleaded that the original carriers must not be disposed of subsequently, as transfer technologies will continue to improve in the future thereby enabling us to transfer analogue material with a precision substantially higher than today.

The next Tonmeistertagung will be held in 1998.

Albrecht Häfner

Sound Recording and Radio Industries Continue to Grow

Current forecasts about the communications industry from the American company Veronis, Suhler & Associates Inc., (investment bankers to the communications and information industries), published in their 10th Annual Communication Industry Forecast Press Release, indicate that sound archives could benefit in many ways from substantial growth in the recording and broadcast industries over the next four years, if only as recipients of new product.

A favorable economic outlook, improved advertising spending across all segments, increased consumer spending on emerging media, and a pickup in expenditures on business information will be among the major factors behind the projected 7.0 percent compound annual growth of the Communications Industry over the 1995-2000 period. The Forecast predicts that total Communications Industry spending will climb to $353.3 billion in 2000, from $251.5 billion in 1995, and will move up to third position in terms of growth among the top-12 U.S. industries, trailing only electronic equipment and components and telecommunication services.

Among the ten industry segments covered by the Forecast, Interactive Digital Media (IDM) will register the largest five-year compound annual growth with a 19.4 percent gain, followed by Subscription Video Services (8.5 percent) and Recorded Music (8.1 percent).

In the same period, according to the Forecast, television, recorded music, consumer books, home video, and the interactive digital media -- principally on-line services, the Internet and video games -- will take up more of consumers' time. By 2000, the number of hours per year devoted to overall media usage by the average consumer will rise to 3,540, from 3,401 in 1995."

More detailed prognostications are given for central IASA concerns, the radio and recording industries, but while their coverage of radio is confined to United States (where deregulation is the driving force), some useful information on global developments can be gained from their overview for the recorded music industry.

"1995 contained four principal messages affecting the outlook for the recorded-music sector. First, it might take several years for growth in demand to catch up with the excess capacity that now exists in the retail marketplace, although a part of the correction occurred in 1995.

Second, it appears that the CD album format began to mature in 1995. In the past, CD sales were fueled by both the purchase of current releases and of catalog titles that consumers wanted to have in the CD format. The catalog aspect of CD sales is waning, and the CD market will become more dependent on current releases over the forecast period than it was over the last five years. Consequently, the growth rates of 20 percent and higher that characterized the format in the recent past will not in all likelihood continue.

Third, CD spending will benefit from what appears to be a definitive decline in the popularity of the cassette format. Although the convenience of the cassette format has helped sustain sales in recent years, it will probably not be enough in the future. Unit sales of cassette singles fell 10.4 million in 1995, while unit sales of CD singles rose by 7.9 million.

Fourth, the price of CD singles in 1995 came down by 14.6 percent, spurring an 84.9 percent rise in unit sales and a 57.9 percent increase in spending. The average CD single price dropped to $5.15 in 1995 from $6.03 in 1994, and unit sales nearly doubled, increasing to 17.2 million from 9.3 million. CD singles captured most of the sales lost to cassette singles and outsold music videos for the first time since the music video format has been tracked. If prices for CD singles continue to ease, as they are expected to do based on the 1995 experience, the CD single format will become a major factor in the recorded-music industry.

Demographics: Over the next five years the fastest-growing segments of the population will be 10-to-19-year-olds and people 45 and over. While the older demographic group buys recorded music far less intensively than the younger generation, there has been an upward trend in sales for the 45-and-over group that should mitigate the adverse sales impact of their growing share of the population. On the plus side, the 10-to-19-year-old group will expand by 7.9 percent over the next five years, and the number of 20-to-24-year-olds, the most intensive music-buying segment of the population, will increase by 1.5 percent, a turnaround in respect to the 3.7 percent decline of the 1990-1995 period. Altogether the number of 10-to-24-year-olds, the key demographic segment for recorded music, will expand by 3.2 million over the forecast period. Thus, the surge in births that began in the early 1980s is beginning to fuel demand for recorded music.

Genres: Among the principal recorded-music genres, urban contemporary posted the largest increase in 1995, moving into third place with an 11.3 percent share. Unit sales for urban contemporary recordings increased 16.7 percent to 126 million from 108 million. Unit sales of country, the second-largest category in 1995, edged up to 186 million from 183 million, accounting for 16.7 percent of the total. Sales of rock recordings, the dominant category with 33.5 percent, suffered a relatively modest 5.4 percent decline to 373 million units. Pop music, the fourth-largest category with a 10.1 percent share, also experienced a modest drop in unit sales to 112 million from 116 million.

DVDs: Digital video disc (DVD) players are scheduled to reach the consumer market in 1996. Although DVDs will provide a significantly better picture and sound than videocassettes, they will not improve on the quality of the CD, which is already digital. However, at prices ranging from $500 to $900, DVD players will be far more expensive than even upper-end CD players.

If the DVD does gain market share, it will be as a replacement for the VCR rather than the CD player. In this regard, the ability to record is crucial, and that feature is not expected to be available until 1998. Consequently, the DVD should not be a major factor in the recorded-music industry over the forecast period.

The Veronis, Suhler & Associates Inc homepage is at http://www.vsacomm.com/

Caruso heard again - in Plymouth

Caruso came to Plymouth twice: in 1909 to give a recital (reviewed in the Plymouth Evening Herald) and in 1913 aboard the liner Wilhelm II bound for Germany. A self-caricature which Caruso drew on that latter occasion is now in the collection of IASA-member and former BBC presenter Joe Pengelly.

Joe Pengelly's interest in Caruso has recently taken audible form with the publication last year of Enrico Caruso: electrical re-creations on Archiphon ARC 116. This compiles several Victor and HMV Caruso re-creations from the 1930s and adds two audacious new recreations of Sullivan's The Lost Chord and Handel's Ombra mai fu.

Joe was assisted in this work by Peter Cox and David Lane. Together they felt that with modern recording equipment and working from the quietest available pressings they could improve on the Victor and HMV re-creations. In 1992 and 1993 they set about bringing Caruso "back to life" in Plymouth.

For The Lost Chord the organist of Sherwell United Reformed Church in Plymouth, Bart Squance, listened on headphones to the previously recorded voice of Caruso to which he added a new organ accompaniment. With Caruso's voice on one track and the new accompaniment on the other it was possible at the post-production stage to re-balance Caruso's voice to produce a mono recording.

For Ombra mai fu Caruso's original was fed to the Devon String Orchestra conducted by Nigel Amherst in a recording studio in Staverton. This arrangement ensured that Caruso's voice shared the same acoustic as the new orchestral accompaniment, with the strings accompanying Caruso as if he were present. This new recording is in stereo.

Re-recordings presumably raise some ontological issues but given that the art of phonography is based on make-believe few will object to the desire to gain new insights into one of the most celebrated singing voices of all time through such innovative use of modern technology. Those of us who heard Joe's enthusiastic presentation of the results of this project at the IASA-ARSC Conference in Washington in 1995 can vouch for their success on purely musical terms and there can be no doubt that Caruso's image has been left intact. A harmless exercise, therefore, when compared to Charles Dodge's Any resemblance is purely coincidental where the "first and greatest icon of phonography" (Eisenberg The recording angel), through an electronic re-working of one of the singer's greatest hits Vesti la giubba, is made to take humiliating pratfalls. Not that Caruso's ghost would be in any position to protest after a lifetime of caricaturing just about everyone in sight and on one famous live occasion slipping a hot sausage into the hand of Nellie Melba during the aria Che gelida manina (Your tiny hand is frozen).

Preservation of Traditional Music from the British Isles

In the past few years a strong need has been identified by recordists, researchers, librarians, and archivists having a specific interest and knowledge in the music of the British Isles, for a more systematic approach to the preservation of recorded sound collections held in private hands. In October 1995 a meeting was held at the National Sound Archive (NSA) in London with a selected group in order to identify the NSA's potential role in fulfilling this need. The NSA was perceived as being the only national institution with the credibility and facilities for required preservation, storage and accessibility. A short-term resolution was to raise funds to employ a person to undertake the audio preservation and cataloguing work on collections identified as being in immediate danger. Building on the initiative of the Folk Arts Archive Research Project, generously sponsored by The National Folk Music Fund (NFMF), which produced a survey of collections held privately and in institutions, and on the outcome of the meeting, we proposed a pilot project that would at once start immediately on preservation work, and serve as experience on which to base further applications for a continued programme. The pilot, funded jointly by the NFMF and the NSA, will focus on the Mike Yates collection, prioritised for attention at the group's meeting in 1995.

The Yates collection is considered one of the most important still held in private hands. Roughly 120 hours of music recordings, consistently of outstanding quality, were made primarily in southern England and the United States, from the late 1960s to the mid-80s. They include primary (and frequently first) recordings of a range of artists such as Frank Hinchliffe and Johnny Doughty in England, and members of the Wallin family from North Carolina, preceding recordings made and subsequently released by large organisations like the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution. In America he followed in Cecil Sharp's footsteps, recording in the Appalachian Mountains, though, unlike Sharp and other collectors of his time, Yates also recorded a great deal of instrumental music. But possibly his most important recordings are those he made among travellers in Kent and other southern counties in England. While a fair amount of the recordings have been published (on the Topic, Homemade Music, and EFDSS labels), because of Yate's exceptionally high standards, the collection includes very high quality recordings never released.

Recordings will be digitised for archive and playback purposes, and a catalogue will be produced on the NSA's database, CADENSA. Copies of the recordings and catalogue will be deposited at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library.

Janet Topp-Fargion

Stanford Promotes Fair Use

The Council on Library Resources, FindLaw Internet Legal Resources, and the Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources have jointly sponsored the Copyright & Fair Use Site at Stanford University. This comprises a searchable collection of resources including primary materials, legislation, articles, example curricula, and pointers to other Internet/web resources.

The Stanford Fair Use site can be found at http://fairuse.stanford.edu/

Digital domain - the British Library Research and Innovation Centre

The Research & Development Department of the British Library was renamed the Research and Innovation Centre (RIC) last June. Its web pages can be found as part of the British Library's Portico address (http://portico.bl.uk/ric/overview.html) and here you can read about progress with the UK's attempts to extend legal deposit to sound recordings. But a growing selection of RIC reports are to be found on the United Kingdom Office of Library and Information Networking (UKOLN) site at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/papers/bl/.

Of interest to those contemplating services based on digitisation programmes will be the recent report compiled by the Marc Fresko Company The Impact of Digital resources on British Library Reading Rooms (British Library Research and Innovation report 3), 1996. The full HTML Version of the report is available at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/fresko/digital-media/contents.html. Here, exclusively for IASA Bulletin readers, is part of the abstract:

The study finds that this is an area which has received little attention. For the most part, it is not possible to produce meaningful quantitative estimates. Qualitatively, some factors will tend to increase demand (digital catalogues, Internet access in Reading Rooms, access to CD-ROMs) while others will decrease demand (remote access to digital resources, whether digitised by the British Library or not). The study produces a model which categorises the different kinds and uses of digital resources, and which allows for more detailed analysis.

Also check out http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/papers/bl/sdi. This leads to the British Library Research and Development Department Sources of Digital Information Report. From this page you can download the entire report. The files are Microsoft Word for Windows 2 format. The report lists and describes over three hundred sources of digital information, not all of which are available on the Internet.

The Research and Innovation Centre produces a quarterly Research Bulletin and has recently compiled a list of its publications which are mostly in the form of reports ranging across the whole spectrum of library and information work. These (but not the reports themselves) are obtainable free of charge on request from the Support Unit, The British Library Research and Innovation Centre, 2 Sheraton Street, London W1V 4BH, tel. 00 44 (0)171 412 7051 or 7053.

European Concerted Actions

A report on the Telematics for Libraries Concertation meeting Exploitation of R&D results held in Luxembourg last June has been published (Luxembourg: Commission of The European Communities, 1996).

The objective of this meeting was to exchange experiences and information on the problems of exploiting the results of the projects which made up the Fourth Framework Programme, which included JUKEBOX.

The problems (which will not come as a great surprise to anyone) can be summarised generally as follows:

  • partnerships or consortia cease to exist when the Commission's funding runs out and the parent organisations find other things for their staff to do;

  • participants tend to be more committed to research than commercialisation;

  • research is often too remote from commercial viability;

  • technological developments overtake the results;

  • ownership protection:

  • and for libraries and archives in particular:

  • experience with commercialisation is limited;

  • the intended market is too small to support the commercialisation;

  • there is no money to take the idea forward to exploitation.

Recommendations by the various partnerships to the Commission to deal with these problems cannot be met in full by the Commission and it cannot assume the role of a consultancy firm. However, it does encourage partnerships to budget for representation at conferences and dissemination as part of the planning and it has now issued clear guidelines for the presentation of deliverables and creation of web sites. The Commission's own web site, the part devoted to the Libraries Programme, also provides many links to worldwide resources which may assist with exploitation.

Since one of the main barriers to the exploitation of JUKEBOX is copyright law, it is useful to know that a new service ECUP+ exists to help deliberations about a follow-up project. ECUP+ is a concerted action to enhance awareness among information professionals of copyright issues and several regional workshops have already been held. It is coordinated by EBLIDA (European Bureau of Library Information and Documentation Associations) in The Netherlands. Details of the service can be found within the EC web-site at http://www2.echo.lu/libraries/en/eblida.html or at the EBLIDA web site http://www.kaapeli.fi/eblida/ecup.

Calendar of events

Date Event Location
1997 Feb 12 - Mar 11 ASEAN 3 Seminar Manila
Feb 28 - Mar 1 UNESCO NGO Round Table on Audiovisual Records Paris
Mar 10 -12 International Congress on Ethical, Legal and Societal aspects of digital information Poitiers
Mar 24 - 28 SEAPAVAA General Assemble Jakarta
Apr 1 Midcom: The Middle East Communications Exhibition Abu Dhabi
Apr FIAF Congress Cartagena, Colombia
Apr 30 - May 3 ARSC Annual Conference (hosted by the Country Music Foundation) Nashville, Tennessee
Jul 23 - 26 Second ACM International Conference on Digital Libraries http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~diglib97/ Philadelphia
Aug IFLA Seminar: Bridging gaps through technology  
  IFLA Seminar: New developments in national library services  
Aug 16-19 Sound & Imaging Technology '97 Hong Kong
Aug 31- Sep 5 IAML Annual Conference Geneva
Aug 31- Sep 5 IFLA Council and General Congress Copenhagen
Oct 4-9 IASA Annual Conference Oman, Muscat
Nov UNESCO General Conference Paris
1998    
1998 March SEAPAVAA General Assembly  
May ARSC General Conference Syracuse, NY
Jul 20-24 Conservation conference: Care of photographic, moving image and sound collections York, UK
Aug IFLA Council and General Conference Amsterdam
1999    
May? IASA Annual Conference Vienna
August IFLA Council and General Conference Bangkok
2000    
2000 IFLA Council and General Conference Jersusalem

This Information Bulletin was compiled by:

The Editor of IASA, Chris Clark,
The British Library National Sound Archive, 29 Exhibition Road, London SW7 2AS, UK,
tel. 44 171 412 7411, fax 44 171 412 7413, e-mail chris.clark@bl.uk,

Printed in Budapest, Hungary

PLEASE SEND ANY COPY FOR INFORMATION BULLETIN NO 21 BY 15 MARCH 1997