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This document is downloaded from DR‑NTU (https://dr.ntu.edu.sg) Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Broadcasting sound archives in the Federal Republic of

Kresing‑Wulf, Felix

1989

Kresing‑Wulf, F. (1989). sound archives in the Federal Republic of Germany. In AMIC‑ Workshop on Documentation and Archival Techniques : Singapore, Nov 28‑Dec 7, 1989. Singapore: Asian Mass Communication Research and Information Centre. https://hdl.handle.net/10356/91507

Downloaded on 29 Sep 2021 12:42:51 SGT ATTENTION: The Singapore Copyright Act applies to the use of this document. Nanyang Technological University Library

Broadcasting Sound Archives In The Federal Republic Of Germany

By

Felix Kresing-Wulf

Paper No.16 ATTENTION: The Singapore Copyright Act applies to the use of this document. Nanyang Technological University Library

Broadcasting Sound Archives in the Federal Republic of Germany

Before starting with my review of the broadcasting sound archives in the Federal Republic of Germany I'd like to give you a brief introduction to the structure of West German broadcasting. This structure is based on the results of the Second World War. After the German surrender in May 1945 the country was decentralized. Ten states, the so-called Lander, including were created. Soon the Allies started broadcasting in their zones of occupied Germany. In 1948 those stations, which had been founded by the American, the British and the French military governments, were transferred to the responsibility of the German states. Today there are nine regional broadcasting systems, which produce up to five daily programms of 18 or more hours for the citizens of their regions. They also contribute productions to the First German which was established as a nation-wide television channel in 1953. The number of contributions to this channel depend on the regional station size. The largest, (WDR), provides 25 percent, while the smallest stations, Saarl&ndischer Rundfunk (SR) and Radio (RB), each contribute 3 percent. Furthermore these broa'dcasting corporations produce programs for the regional third television channel. All of them are organized as corporations with control in the hands of representatives of the public. They are financed mainly by the fees of the listeners and viewers of their region and secondarily by the charges for the commercials, which they are allowed to broadcast in a strictly limited time. The Deutsche Welle and the were founded in 1960 under federal law. The Deutsche Welle broadcasts in 34 languages on shortwave to countries around the world. The transcription services of the Deutsche Welle produce various radio and television programms, which can be ordered and transmitted by foreign broadcasting stations free of charge. The Deutschlandfunk, broadcasting on the long and medium waves, covers Europe in 13 languages. The Deutsche Welle is financed entirely from the federal budget, similar to the external services of other countries, while the Deutschlandfunk gets 50 percent of its budget from the regional broadcasting corporations. All of these 11 regional or federal broadcasting corporations are members of the Association of the Corporations of the Federal Republic of Germany (ARD), which was founded in 1950 in order to strengthen and to coordinate the cooperation of these radio systems. The RIAS (Radio in the American sector of Berlin), which was founded and for a long period funded by the USA, hasn't come under full German control, although it has been mainly financed by the federal budget for several years. Sa the RIAS hasn't become a full member of the ARD up to now, but its representatives take part in all conferences of the ATTENTION: The Singapore Copyright Act applies to the use of this document. Nanyang Technological University Library

ARD as non-voting members. The Second German Television (ZDF) was founded in 1961 as a joint institution of the West German states. Although it's also a public broadcasting corporation, the ZDF didn't become a member of the ARD, because one of the intentions of establishing a second German television channel was the desire for competition in making good programs. Since 1981, when the Federal Constitutional Court decided that the public corporations should no longer have a monopoly on broadcasting because of essential developments in transmitting techniques, many private broadcasting companies have been founded in all parts of Germany. State Broadcast Regulatory Offices were established, which are responsible for giving the necessary broadcasting licenses. Coming back to the topic I want to talk about this afternoon, I have to confess that I can only talk about the sound archives of the public broadcasting organizations. Only a few of the major private broadcasting companies have set up their own sound archives up to now. I don't know anything about these sound archives, because there hasn't been any collegial cooperation. All of the 13 public broadcasting corporations which I have introduced to you have several archives and libraries. Firstly I would like to explain to you the organizational structure of these departments. You may possibly think that there aren't any differences in the organizational structure of these archives, but due to several distinctions in the historical development of the broadcasting corporations various organizational models were worked out. In most of the broadcasting corporations the sound archives are parts of an overall archives and documentation department. Such departments were created at Deutschlandfunk (DLF), (HR), RIAS, Saarlandischer Rundfunk (SR), (SFB), Siiddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR), Sudwestfunk (SWF), Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) and Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF). Beside the sound archives the libraries, the press archives and in some cases also the television archives are integrated in these departments. At the Bayrischer Rundfunk (BR), Deutsche Welle, (NDR) and (RB) the various archives and libraries work as separate units. The size of the various sound archives depends on the size of the broadcasting corporation'itself and the number of programms, which are produced and transmitted daily. The Deutsche Welle, the BR, the NDR and WDR have the "biggest sound archives with up to 40 employees. In the contrast the staff of the sound archives of the smallest German broadcasting corporations, Radio Bremen and the Saarlandische Rundfunk, are less than 10 people. The next figure shows, that the majority of the German broadcasting sound archives, whether they are parts of an overall department or not, belong to the radio division. Only the sound archives of the WDR and the ZDF, which are included in their archives and documentation departments, ATTENTION: The Singapore Copyright Act applies to the use of this document. Nanyang Technological University Library -a—

are integrated in the administration division. In most of the broadcasting corporations the heads of the archives departments or" of the separate sound archives have to report to the director of radio, in some cases to the programme supervisor (BR, RB, SR) and in three broadcasting corporations (NDR, WDR, ZDF) to -the heads of other departments. Because the internal - organizational structure of the broadcasting sound archives varies greatly, it's impossible for me to compare them in this matter, but I can give you some examples. The sound archives of the Deutsche Welle, which employs 40 persons, is divided into 4 sections : the music documentation, the spoken word documentation, the information section and the preservation section. The sound archives of the HR with employees consists of the sections music documentation, music library, preservation (temporary and long-term storage) and spoken word documentation, which is combined with the historical archives.

Leaving this topic and coming to the problems of cataloguing, I'd like to introduce to you the ARD cataloguing manuals for . spoken word and for music recordings. These cataloguing rules, originally set up in 1970's, have been obligatory since 1988 in a revised edition for all sound archives of the members of ARD and for€ the sound archives of the ZDF. The creation of these manuals, which lasted, many years, was necessary to improve the cooperation of the broadcasting archives. The rules considerably differ from the rules of the German National Library, which are used by all German public libraries and by most of the scientific libraries, because the specific needs of the programme-making and of the technical departments of the broadcasting stations would*nt have been fullfilled., if the library manuals had been adopted. The advantage of elaborating an obligatory manual for, the cataloguing of music recordings was the possibility to establish a joint institution of ARD and ZDF, which is responsible for the formal description of all commercial music records with light and folk music. This institution, called the central record cataloguing department (ZSK), was founded in 1978 as a new department of the German Broadcasting Archives (DRA) in . It is financed by the 12 broadcasting corporations of the ARD (including RIAS) and by the ZDF. All German broadcasting corporations have signed a contract with the German branch of the International Federation of Phonographic Industry (IFPI). This contract guarantees, that all sound archives and the central record cataloguing department get one copy of each record, which is published on the German market. Before the ZSK was founded, each of the broadcasting sound archives had to catalogue the same records. Now the ZSK is making the formal description corresponding to the rules of the ARD/ZDF cataloguing manual as quick as possible and delivering the data to the 13 sound archives. Since 1984 these data have also been provided to the Swiss Radio Corporation, which pays an annual fee for it. So a lot of money could be saved by establishing this joint institution. ATTENTION: The Singapore Copyright Act applies to-4 the- use of this document. Nanyang Technological University Library

The precondition of the cooperation between ZSK and the various sound archives of the broadcasting stations was the installation of music databases in almost all German and Swiss radio sound archives. Only two of them, the Deutsche Welle and Radio Bremen, haven't installed databases yet. The Deutsche Welle plans to its own music database next year by adopting the system IBAS, which has been used by the Deutschlandfunk since 1980. You might be surprised, that there exist no less than 8 different database systems for the 13 West German radio stations. Several reasons are responsible for this situation, such as the federal independence of the radio corporations in West Germany, the different preconditions and developments in the respective EDP departments-and the requirements of the sound archives in connection with the programme and licence departments in particular. Although the German radio corporations have installed mainframe computers of different producers ( IBM, Siemens and UNISYS) and their information retrieval systems are based on different software ( STAIRS, GOLEM/PASSAT, IBAS, ADABAS etc. ), all broadcasting sound archives are able to use the data produced by the ZSK and delivered on a magnetic tape. Before delivery the data are converted into a data exchange format which can be "understood" by all the different types of computers.

After importing the data into the in-house databases of the broadcasting archives the documents can be completed by adding the internal data like the accession number and possibly some subject headings. Beside the archival data of commercial records with light music the data of commercial records with classical music as well as the data of radio music recordings are stored in these databases. The music database of the biggest broadcasting corporation of the ARD, the WDR, today contains about 300 000 documents. The databases of the other sound archives are smaller, but also contain more than 100.000 documents.

In addition to the music databases archival databases for the spoken-word recordings were developed in some broadcasting corporations. Up to now four broadcasting archives, that is SDR, SWF, SR, WDR, have set up their own databases. The data structure of these databases is corresponded to the ARD-manual for the cataloguing of spoken-word recordings. Furthermore almost all television archives (except Deutsche Welle and RIAS) have installed databases which Cover the data of their television productions. In 1984 the directors of the regional German broadcasting corporations entered into an agreement that it would be very helpful for the programme planning, and in particular for the third TV channels, to be informed about all TV productions already in the planing stage, in order to avoid dublications of programs and to make the exchange of TV programms easier. ATTENTION: The Singapore Copyright Act applies to the use of this document. Nanyang Technological University Library

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Therefore working groups of archivists and EDP specialists were appointed who decided to integrate the so-called pool and planning data files into the general TV database systems. Today the TV databases of the participating broadcasting corporations consist of data files of the own TV productions, the pool data file for the third TV channels of all regional TV archives and , in some cases, of a data file for the physically erased TV productions which neverthelesss should be documented in the database system. The pool data files which contain the data collection of either TV- productions in progress or TV productions selected for programme exchange within the ARD, are send monthly by machine-readible data carriers to the participating TV archives.

Further EDP applications exist at the Deutschlandfunk and the SWF, where the catalogs of the library are beeing transferred into a database, and at the SDR, "where the archivists of the press archives have "designed a magazine index database. Some other press archives, especially the DLF, the WDR and the ZDF, are planning to create their own magazine and newspaper index databases in the next 3-5 years, because the proposal of joint ARD/ZDF press database, which was worked out by a working group of archivists, wasn't accepted by the executive directors of the broadcasting corporations. Finally I'd like to introduce to you one institution, I've just mentioned before, the German Broadcasting Archives (DRA). The DRA was established in 1952 as a foundation of the members of the ARD. The main task of this institution is the preservation of those documents, radio and TV programms, which are part of the national heritage of Germany. But only the files of the ARD conferences and historical sound recordings, especially of the central pre-war German radio corporation Reichsrundfunkgesellschaft, are collected by the DRA itself. The post-war productions are stored at the various broadcasting corporations, I've mentioned above, but the archivists of these broadcasting corporations send one copy of the index-card of the most important productions to the DRA, where they will be integrated into the central catalogue of the ARD. So, if you are interested in a clip of a famous German contemporary person, please write to the colleagues of the DRA or call them by phone and they will tell you, where it is stored. ATTENTION: The Singapore Copyright Act applies to the use of this document. Nanyang Technological University Library

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Public Broadcasting Corporations of the Federal Republic of Germany

Name Responsibility Serv (by law or treaty)

1) (BR) Regi Bavarian Broadcasting Corp. (Rad

2) Hessischer Rundfunk (HR) Hessen Regi Hessen Broadcasting Corporation (Rad

3) Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) Schleswig-Holstein, Regi North German Radio Corporation , (Rad

4) Radio Bremen (RB) Bremen Regi (Rad

5) Suddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR) Baden-WOrttemberg Regi South German Braodcasting Corp. (Rad

6) Sender Freies Berlin (SFB) Berlin Regi Radio Free Berlin m&ru - (Rad 7) Saarlandischer Rundfunk (SR) Saarland -- »-• Regi Broadcasting Corp. of the Saar V;:^*- •:• *'& (Rad '.'V; -'j*T^8f%^?-"-'u-.'-'ftijv.'"**» .";'" 8) Siidwestfunk (SWF) Baden-WOrttemberg * Regi Southwest German Broadc. Corp. Rhineland-Palatinate (Rad

9) Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) Regi West German Broadcasting Corp. North Rhine -Westptia 1 i a (Rad

10) Deutsche Welle (DW) Federal Republic Exte Voice of Germany of Germany (Rad

11) Deutschlandfunk (DLF) Federal Republic Exte: of Germany (Rad

12) RIAS BERLIN Natii Radio in the American Sector of Berlin Information Agency (Rad

13) Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) Shared responsibility Natit Second German television channel of the German states (TV)