FORT WORTH, September 21, 2000-- Fort Worth, Texas based Analogue, a technology, archive service and marketing company, and its managing general partner, Abamedia, L.P. have announced the planned development of a Web-based system to provide access to and preservation of historically significant audiovisual materials from the world's major public archives and state-owned museums. This project has attracted numerous international participants including the Central European University Archive, an affiliate of George Soros' Open Society Archives (OSA), and the Discovery Channel Germany.

The system, World Archives Online (WAO), will draw upon Abamedia's five years of experience in audiovisual preservation, access and marketing services to generate revenues for these public institutions. These funds will make the institutions more economically self-sustaining and insure that their valuable audiovisual materials are preserved and accessible. As the system grows, Analogue's private investors expect to benefit from additional revenues produced by media licensing, advertising and consumer sales, as well as the marketing of proprietary technologies.

The Open Society Archives (OSA) has announced a grant of $120,000 through the Central European University Archive in Budapest, Hungary to assist Abamedia and the Russian State Film and Photo Archive at Krasnogorsk with the completion of the archive’s Russian language film catalogue. This work will allow online access to detailed catalogue entries for over 40,000 titles of film — over 11,000 hours of material. An additional financial commitment has been made by OSA to translate the entire catalogue into English for online deployment through Analogue’s Russian Archives Online (www.russianarchives.com).

OSA is seeking further opportunities to cooperate with other archives. Discussions are underway regarding a grant towards the modernization of the Russian State Archive of Scientific and Technical Documents’ catalogue and online availability of this resource through Russian Archives Online. In addition, OSA is considering a global partnership with Analogue's World Archives Online project to assist with the preservation and cataloging of significant audiovisual archives in other parts of the world.

In a related development, Analogue has signed a memorandum of agreement with the Discovery Channel Germany to provide online historical Russian media to the German-speaking territories of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Luxembourg, and the Italian region of Alto Adige. In addition, Discovery Germany will assist Analogue in furthering the development of the World Archives Online project. Oskar Preussen, General Manager Discovery Channel Germany says: "This international cooperation emphasizes Discovery's overall desire to make full use of media technologies and content. The partnership marks an important step towards integrating film archives into Discovery Online for the benefit of both the professional user as well as the end consumer."

Announcing the development of World Archives Online, Abamedia president J. Mitchell Johnson stated, "Preservation of the world's media heritage is of growing concern in this digital age. Many historians, artists, filmmakers, broadcasters and sociologists recognize the need to preserve the world's visual heritage or what is being called "multimedia ecology". WAO meets this need in a way that stands to make state-owned archives and museums all over the world less vulnerable to the whims of governmental support and at the same time provide quality content to meet the growing demands of print, media and Internet producers." Johnson also expressed the expectation that the WAO project would generate a growing revenue stream for Analogue’s private investors.

Analogue's WAO is an outgrowth of Abamedia's first media licensing project, Russian Archives Online, which is the official international trade representative of the Russian State Film and Photo Archive at Krasnogorsk. The Krasnogorsk Archive contains more than 200,000 reels of film beginning with the coronation of Tsar Nicolas II in 1896 up to contemporary times, and over a million photographic prints dating from the 1850s.

Guided by Analogue, WAO is developing a proprietary technology system to speed the retrieval of audiovisual material in a multilingual environment in order to improve access to images, motion pictures, and audio recordings required by educators, publishers, advertisers, film/TV/Internet producers and other users.

Johnson expects that the success of the Russian Archives Online and the interest expressed by the Open Society Archives and the Discovery Channel Germany will permit WAO to rapidly enlist other national archives and museums into the project. He also points to the involvement of strategic and financial partners such as the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Public Broadcasting Service, ABC/Disney's Devillier Donegan Enterprises, and GSD&M Advertising of Austin, Texas (an Omnicom agency) as reason for optimism.

Under Johnson's direction, Abamedia has been a leading producer of television programming for more than 20 years, beginning with contacts made during the 1977 filming of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Abamedia has drawn upon materials from the Krasnogorsk Archive to produce a documentary for The History Channel entitled "Yanks for Stalin" and the critically-acclaimed four-part PBS series "Red Files," as well as developing numerous other film and publishing projects that will make use of the material from the Russian archives.

Located in the Central European University complex in central Budapest, Hungary, Open Society Archives operates one of the world's major archival sites for documents relating to the Cold War and the history of communism. The complex includes open-access research facilities, a three-level underground archival storage area and even a manufacturing department which makes its own storage and shipping containers for archive materials. The core of the collection are the archives of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which contain the documents that served as the basis for thousands of radio programs from 1949 to 1993. In addition to its collection relating to the Cold War, the OSA focuses on materials relating to human rights and human rights violations.

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