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BIRTH specific questions:
The ORF TV archive is one of the content producing partners within the BIRTH consortium. That means we will provide audiovisual content (moving image and stills) as well as other sources linked to the early history of TV in Austria (programme schedules, biographies and texts on the development of TV in Austria). Furthermore we are strongly participating in the conceptual discussion about what the BIRTH website will look like and is going to offer. Thus we are undertaking efforts in questioning representative samples of all user groups to find out what future users are expecting. The link to the academic world is very important to the ORF and so we see it as one of our tasks to keep contact with the academic community to be able to let its points of view influence the discussion process about the project goals. Concerning the workpackages and deliverables the ORF is responsible for the WP4 “Rights Management and Metadata Reconstruction” dealing the management of rights information and the clearance of rights as well as the recovery of contractual information and damaged or lost metadata. Furthermore we will, as stated above, be very active in WP2 “Archival Research and Content Preparation”.

- Which historical period will be covered, and please explain the start and end date.
The ORF will cover the period from August 1st, 1955 till the end of the 1960ies within the BIRTH project. It was in August 1955 when the ORF started to broadcast regularly a TV programme. The end of the 1960ies was marked by one the company’s most important change in the management structure and in the legislative framework the ORF is working within. Concerning archiving it was then when a new cataloguing system, the card catalogue, was introduced.

Directory Information:
Dr Peter Dusek
Head of Archives
archiv@orf.at
Tel: +43-1-87878-12380
Fax: +43-1-87878-12979
Würzburggasse 30
A-1136 WIEN
AUSTRIA

Organisation Type:
The ORF is an independent public media enterprise and as such a foundation under public law.

Organisation Role:
As the leading broadcaster in Austria the ORF not only broadcasts programmes, but also produces them and with the archive department being a part of the company documenting and archiving is also done in-house. The license department is dealing with all questions concerning footage licensing.

Description of organisation:
The ORF has been founded in 1955 and started broadcasting a small amount of hours three times a day on one channel. The audience grew quickly larger and in 1959 already 100000 licences had been given out. Form 1961 the ORF experimented with establishing a second channel. Ten years later programmes on both channels were broadcasted seven days a week. A big organizational reform in 1967 led to a federal structure of the company with its now nine regional studios built by the famous Austrian architect Gustav Peichl. Milestones in the programme history of the ORF were amongst others the coverage of the Soviet Invasion in CSSR in 1968, the US presidential election in the same year and of the Moon landing in 1969. In 1985 3SAT, a new satellite channel jointly managed by the ARD, ZDF (Ger), SRG (CH) and the ORF, started its programme. With the launch of the own orf.at website in 1997 the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation turned into a tri-media company serving the public via radio, TV and the nation's most important news-website. Today the ORF is maintaining two 24-hour TV programmes, 14 radio programmes and cooperating in the programming of three European channels: 3SAT, ARTE and BR-ALPHA. 2630 employees and about 1500 freelancers are ensuring ORF's high quality standards in a highly competing market.

Hours and Days of service:
ORF's programmes are broadcasted 24h daily on two channels. The ORF's TV Archive services are available Mo-Fr 08:00-20:00 (7:30-24:00 for news issues) and Sa/Su 12:00-20:00 (7:30-24:00 for news issues).

Audience served:
The ORF as Austria's biggest broadcaster is serving the whole public and tries to offer attractive programmes for everyone within its reach. Despite strongt pressure of german private broadcasters via their cable and/or satellite networks the ORF meets still with highest acceptance on the audience side.

Conditions for use:
The ORF's TV archives are a part of the company and thus mainly responsible for supporting journalists in making their programmes. The use of the archive for the academic world is a very restricted one due to personnel and time shortage. The "Bildbank" of the "ORF Enterprise" is dealing with requests for archive material from outside customers. (contact: Marion Oberndorfer, Tel: 0043 1 87077 15019, Fax: 0043 1 87007 15090, email: marion.oberdorfer@orf.at )

Collection and Genre strength:
The ORF TV archives are archiving not only all the broadcasted programmes but also the rushes of ORF's own productions. Thus we can provide material that has never been shown before and that is belonging to the ORF. The collection genres include among others:
*news
*documentaries
*entertainment programmes
*TV series
*sports
*culture
*children and youth programmes
*features films

Preservation activities:
Now preservation at the ORF-Archives has been a matter of an on-demand-service, exception has been the transcription of all 2-inch-tapes on 1-inch and/or MII in the mid-90's of last century. Now big projected preservation-activity took place, mostly in consequence of small budget for new TV productions. Beginning in fall last year ORF started the planning of a huge preservation project, including the digitization of most of our analogue materials (2-inch, 1-inch, U-Matic and MII). Core activity for the next months is the pre-selection of contents and carriers to be preserved, starting with the creating of a white-paper for preservation-selection. In parallel to this the implementation of different business-models for reselling and alike are analyzed and tested, to re-gain at least 25% of the estimated preservation-budget within the next 10 years. Some key-data of the planned preservation-activities: Approx. 120k-150k hours to be digitized, Target-format: IMX 50Mbit Source-formats: 2-inch (15k-20k hrs) ,1-inch (30k hrs), Matic (10k hrs),MII (80k hrs) Time-scope: 5 yrs (2-inch starting 2003, others will follow later)

Preservation contact information:
Herbert HAYDUCK
Herbert.hayduck@orf.at
Tel: +43-1-87878-12380
Fax: +43-1-87878-12979
Würzburggasse 30
A-1136 WIEN
AUSTRIA

Cataloging activities:
The database-landscape at ORF is to be examined in six dimensions:

• descriptive content-metadata (e.g. persons on screen)
• technical content-metadata (e.g. aspect ratio)
• production metadata (e.g. cameraman)
• transmission metadata (e.g. transmission date/time, audience rating)
• carrier metadata (e.g. tape length) rights metadata (e.g. production company) This attempt is complicated by the existence of a number of databases, which keep information
• sometimes independently and in a competitive way - at various stages of the production and transmission process. For archive purposes the FARAO ("Fernseharchiv- und Abfragesystem des ORF") is the most important database. It holds the majority of descriptive information, including story-summary, persons on screen, description of visual content and summarizes technical information, including length of programme, black&white vs. color, aspect ratio and sound characteristics as well as it contains the names of production personnel and responsible departments as far as they appear in the cast-lists or on inserts. Descriptive information may cover various compository levels:
• programme and
• contribution resp. chapter or segment (i.e. a virtual contribution in order to structure especially documentaries more "readable").
• "Higher" compository levels, like series or serial and brand, have less impact on the datamodel and are usually rather implicit.
• "Lower
• compository levels, like shot or take and layer and track, are not considered in these datamodels, whereas intermediate granularities, like sequence, are implicitly adressed in FARAO (description visual content) and ORFEUS (tc-boundaries for validity of contracts or clauses). In addition other possible organisatory levels are collection or cluster, which group material according to different attributes, like common origin. Quality of annotation and retrieval is dependent on training & experience, tools & time: " Freetext promises easy input but may " due to errors and the flexibiliy of language - complicate retrieval. This disadvantage may be facilitated on the retrieval side by tools, which expand the query-string in order to cover for example synonyms or word-stems.

Thesauri and controlled vocabulary need to be maintained, input and training is more time-consuming, but retrieval may be optimized in terms of queries-per-request. Databases at ORF support predominantly freetext-entry with certain attributes validated by controlled vocabularies. FARAO has a few attributes, which are controlled by vocabularies, e.g. keywords, programme-format, production department. At ORF three main-profils for documentalists are in use: General documentalists take care of all kinds of programmes. Usually they are specialized for certain topics (e.g. sports, parliament). They usually also work in the call center and as production researchers. Nevertheless some of them work just in documentation as part-time project-oriented documentalists (mostly trainees) or as teleworking documentalists. Department documentalists are payed by the respective production department and deal woth raw-material coming from these production departments. In some cases they also take over the annotation of the "regular" programmes or of old programmes of that department. Newsfeed documentalists work only on the incoming newsfeed material (EBU) and are naturally tightly integrated into the newsroom-workflow and especially the monitoring-service.

Catalog contact information:
Herbert HAYDUCK
Herbert.hayduck@orf.at
Tel: +43-1-87878-12380
Fax: +43-1-87878-12979
Würzburggasse 30
A-1136 WIEN
AUSTRIA

Database contact information:
Johannes KRAUS
Johannes.Kraus@orf.at
Tel: +43-1-87878-13061
Fax: +43-1-87878-12979
Würzburggasse 30
A-1136 Wien
AUSTRIA

Public service contact:
ORF-Kundendienst
ORF-Zentrum
Würzburggasse 30
A - 1136 Wien
Phone: 0043-1-87070-30
(daily 8:00 •24:00)
Fax: 0043-1-87070-330
E-Mail: kundendienst@orf.at
www: http://kundendienst.orf.at/

Homepage URL:
http://www.orf.at

Involvement in international projects:
The ORF Archive was and still is partner in various EU-projects namely from the IST programme (AMICITIA, FIRST, PRESTO) and in the MEDIA plus programme (BIRTH).

Involvement in national projects concerning:
The ORF TV Archive is partner in a national project called "bildarchiv Austria" (BAA) aiming at making digitally accessible and saleable about 40000 photographs from four institutions: the Austrian National Library, the Institute for Contemporary History at the University of Vienna, the Association of Working Class History and the ORF's TV Archive.