"Journale" - The Radio News of ORF 1990 - 1999

The aim of this project is to open to the (academic) public a stock of audiovisual recordings permanently: a radio news line of the Austrian Radio (ORF, Österreich 1) called "Journale" (magazines) will be catalogued and digitally safeguarded as well as used for a first scientific analysis. - Based on preliminary work the project deals with the period 1990-1999 of this programme which is filed in the form of DAT-Cassettes in the archives of "Österreichische Mediathek" at the moment. For contemporary historians these "Journale" constitute one of the most important audiovisual collections and an essential source for the political, social and cultural development, public opinion and lifestyle of this time period. Therefore one of the primary aims of this project is to make these holdings accessible in a way that further scientific work with them is not only possible but stimulated. So a catalogue with formal entries as well as content indexing is needed. Modern methods of editing will be applied via on-line accessibility: The audio recordings of "Journale" will be put into the internet. The Mediathek-online-platform consists of two parts: One part is a combination of catalogue and media player (streaming, MP3), the second part is a combination of text and sound examples, that is web-pages, on which the results of the project research are presented in form of articles combined with sound recordings. - Besides this there will also be established a new forum for user-generated content as part of the on-line platform. An academic community will be given the opportunity to publish findings for which they have used these sources. This form of accessibility presupposes the digitisation of the recordings which is necessary from another point of view also: Audiovisual media - and the "Journale"-recordings - have a far shorter life span than traditional media. Therefore it is an integral part of the project to make provisions for long term digital preservation. While this aspect is still largely underestimated in academic circles, the project aims at coming up with an exemplary solution for the problem of long term accessibility of audiovisual sources. To give examples how that kind of audiovisual source can be used, the project also includes the scientific analysis of the material with regard to some especially interesting subjects. This will show, that specific methods have to be applied respectively developed when dealing with audiovisual sources: av-media like radio news are not just spoken text with some background noises. They have the special capacity of conveying non-verbal information, that is the emotions of lots of people, the acoustical style of them and of the period.

Radio news preserved forever: protection of fragile sources through digitisation, content-related reprocessing of documents (metadata acquisition), free access to all documents via Internet, digital long-term archiving and analysis of selected topics: those were the emphases of the project about the reprocessing of radio journals of the ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation) from the years 1990-1999. The Journale freely accessible for all: the central result of the project is the Internet platform www.journale.at: over 3.000 hours of Journale from the 1990s are currently available in full length, the focus lays on the Mittagsjournale in particular. This is equivalent to about 47.5000 single segments on the most important Austrian as well as international topics from the years 1990 to 1999. Taking into account two preceding projects (Journale 1967-1989), a total of over 8.000 hours of broadcasts and over 100.000 single segments are available: material for scientific research, the education sector and for all interested parties.In the centre of the project stood the Mittagsjournale the main news broadcast of the radio station Ö1 (ORF), which brings close to an hour of information from the sectors of interior and exterior politics, economy, society, science and culture. These broadcasts available in the archive of the Österreichische Mediathek on audiotape and DAT-tape were digitised and digitally long-term archived, collected in a database even on single segment level (including all featured direct quotes) and integrated into the online-platform. Adapted even for Smartphone, an intensive use of a hitherto scarcely accessible source form is now possible. Experiencing history sensuously: the Journale provide news headlines, reportages, interviews, background and correspondent's reports on all important events of the decade. By means of the listening experience, period atmosphere is transmitted in addition to the information. Here, a boundless selection is available, especially if you want to listen to the events again in the original. Retrospectively, however, these archived broadcasts of the volatile medium radio become important acoustic documents of not only Austrian contemporary history. Scientific reprocessing: several articles on the subject attempt to show what you can pick out of these sources and which approaches to a potential scientific analysis are possible. Journale as a source of contemporary historical and media historical research, online in a form that tries to do justice to the source's character: audio documents not as an illustration of a subject, but as a subject in its own right. These articles are also part of the platform www.journale.at.