IASA 2019 Annual Conference

The Österreichische Mediathek has to collect, document, and preserve the audio-visual cultural heritage of Austria and to make it available to the public. Our proposed paper is dedicated to one of the crucial aspects of archival practice: Collecting the past for future generations and for future research in the humanities and social sciences without, however, knowing exactly the needs and interests of future users and scientists. We will discuss the corresponding aspects of collecting and preserving for the future and metadata in detail – focusing the collection of oral history interviews. What is worth collecting? Are there different strategies regarding collecting for the current use compared to collecting for a future use? How to handle the diverse analogue and digital carriers from many different sources? How to deal with the varying standards and levels of information regarding their integration in our existing databases? The collection of oral history interviews in the Österreichische Mediathek now contains thousands of hours of recordings from the 1970s to the present. Basically, our paper reflects the experiences we gathered during different collecting projects within the last years.