Vienna to Host Centenary Celebrations of Sound Archiving

Vienna to Host Centenary Celebrations of Sound Archiving Vienna, August 24th 1999 - Delegates from more than 40 countries will gather at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna next month to celebrate a century of sound archiving. During a packed four-days of presentations and debates, members of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) will celebrate the founding 100 years ago of the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv - starting point of their profession. A major topic will be the preservation of millions of hours of material including oral histories, dialects and natural sounds plus the world's recorded music and literature currently held on tape, vinyl, shellac and CD. Digitisation and the new possibilities of access to sound recordings via the Internet will also be on the agenda. "Sound recordings have been a vital cultural ingredient of the last 100 years and therefore need to be preserved for future generations, " said Sven Allerstrand, IASA President. "We need to safeguard this material against physical deterioration and unlawful activity," he added. This is the job of sound archivists and most countries around the world now sustain sound archives. The early work of the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv was directed towards traditional music and languages from around the world. The first recordings, using their own device, the Wiener Archiv-Phonograph, were made in 1901 on expeditions to Croatia, the Isle of Lesbos, and to Brazil. These are about to be published on CD. Many of the Phonogrammarchiv's unique recordings have recently been included in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register (http://www.unesco.org/). The Phonogrammarchiv's birthday celebration is on September 20th at the Academy's Festsaal. For further information about the IASA conference and the Phonogrammarchiv contact Dietrich Schüller, pha@oeaw.ac.at IASA (http://www.llgc.org.uk/iasa/) represents archives from all over the world. In Sweden the archive contact is ALB (Sven Allerstrand) +46 8 783 37 00 http://www.alb.se/alb.htm