Report from Documentation Commission meeting in Oslo

The DC Commission had a Commission meeting in Oslo on 30-31 May. The last afternoon was spent together with the P&P Commission. A lot of subjects were discussed and some decissions were made.

To start with we went through the details for the Budapest Conference. We planned the DC's open meeting and the head subject will be the following:

• Firstly the Documentation Commission will present a survey of a research project in the field of documentary description and indexing of multimedia and audio-visual documents in archives. The survey is presented in an article elsewhere in this number of the Newsletter.
• The other subject is : education of documentalist and researchers : generalists of specialists. The emphasis is on how to handle the new multimedia environment. A discussion ensued over how the documentalists' work will change with the emergence of new computer software that will be able to do some or a great deal of the work done by humans today (an example being the computer aided documentation by way of automatic indexing) . When we get machines to help us we should become generalists or specialists.
• One other thing we might present during the Open Meeting is a written report on Teleworking within SVT.

The next subject that was discussed was the suggestion from an earlier meeting that we will try to run a specific Documentation seminar aimed at middle management.

The organising group will be Peter Cox, Annemieke de Jong, Eva-Lis Green and Gùsta Johansson. We are at present investigating the possibility of having the seminar in London in early 1998.

The final part of the meeting we discussed the Commissions work in general and how to enable more project based work within FIAT/IFTA. One conclusion was that more needs to be given back to the FIAT memebership. Bringing information to the members should be a priority. The Commission also need to get impulses from you as members. Don't hesitate to ask for information or suggest projects to the Commission.

Documentation Commission

Eva-Lis Green, co-chair