Since its founding in 1960, the Österreichische Mediathek has evolved from a repository of radio and music recordings into a comprehensive archive of audio, video and digital media, including social media content. With a vast collection of over 2.5 million items, it plays a crucial role in preserving Austria’s cultural and historical heritage for future generations.
Text and photography by Alexei Korolyov
Listen to this piece read by the author
There’s a delicious irony in the fact that the Österreichische Mediathek, or Austrian Media Library, is a branch of Vienna’s Museum of Technology. Its many rooms, spread across several floors of a partially residential building on Webgasse in Vienna’s sixth district, are themselves a sort of museum of technology. Much of it is either already obsolete or well on its way to obsolescence: on the video department floor, VHS players sit alongside bulky U-matic, Betamax and Betacam machines – curious relics of what was once a revolution in home and professional video and a time of fierce rivalry between formats. While DVDs and miniDVDs have a bit more life left in them – though they too are a dying breed – the cassette players are becoming terminally old, with no new units being produced to replace them. “It would be ideal if we could still use them for another ten years, but that’s the maximum,” says Lejla Mehanovic-Smajic of the Mediathek’s video digitisation section. Her workstation – an array of about a dozen screens, some of which are constantly playing videos in the process of being digitised – looks like the desk of a mad computer scientist from a 1980s film.
During The International’s visit, a costumed opera performance from the Vienna State Opera occupies two of the monitors, while some grim documentary unfolds on a third. Mehanovic-Smajic isn’t really watching either; her focus is on the files’ colour levels, checking for any dropouts in quality. Sometimes this requires playing the tape again on another player to see if the dropout persists. However, no upscaling or retouching is ever done on the footage, she says. “Sometimes the signal is not strong, so I intensify it because it’s really about archiving the original as well as possible.”

“What the National Library is for books, the Mediathek is for audio and video.”
Mehanovic-Smajic’s role is just one part of the Mediathek’s work. The video department – like the mass availability of video-playing technology itself – arrived comparatively late, in the 1990s. The Mediathek originally began in 1960 as a way of preserving audio – mainly radio and music made in or related to Austria. These days, some members of its 25-strong team are also collecting social media content – posts and videos about Austrian politics and life in general (due to privacy protection laws, these are never published on the Mediathek’s website and are not accessible to the public in any shape or form). The principle remains the same: to preserve as much of Austria digitally as possible.
“It’s just that the source has changed,” says Gabriele Fröschl, Mediathek head since 2011. “What was formerly collected by radio and TV recordings is now collected by social media.” Fröschl, a historian by training, sees the Mediathek’s mission in historical and national terms: “What the National Library is for books, the Austrian Mediathek is for audio and video recordings. Archives are not only collecting for the public now, but are also collecting for the public in the future.” Consequently, the Mediathek is entirely funded by the Austrian state, though the precise figure wasn’t available at the time of the interview. Some of its projects hold particular significance for the nation’s pride and image – in 2018, for instance, the organisation curated a special online exhibition marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of the first Austrian republic following WWI and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

All in all, there are around 115,000 audio items and 14,000 video items available online on the Mediathek’s website, with many more accessible in person at its visitor centre on Gumpendorfer Straße. The entire Mediathek collection comprises more than 2.5 million recordings, with only 3,000 to 4,000 of them out of reach for users. The originals are stored on up to 150,000 vinyl records, followed by around 110,000 CDs, about 70,000 audio cassettes, and some 75,000 computer files. The remainder is made up of VHS and other video tapes, digital audio tapes and special formats.
About half of the Mediathek’s material – both audio and video – comes from private donations. This includes individuals taping TV news or recording radio broadcasts, but it also encompasses collaborations with various institutions such as the State Opera, theatre festivals and the Austrian parliament, which provide their recordings to be archived. Another 10% are purchases, including CD and DVD releases, while the remaining 40% comes from the Mediathek’s own recordings of radio and TV, as well as its own production unit, which makes something called Oral History Interviews.

“Archives are not only collecting for the public now, but are also collecting for the future.”
While much of the Mediathek’s content is somewhat secondary to its archival mission (there are no restrictions on what can be collected, according to Fröschl, though material considered extremist or inflammatory is kept out of the public domain), Oral History is among the organisation’s most historically sensitive projects. The interviews, which last up to six hours, capture the everyday lives of Austrians as shared by ordinary people. Some of these stories include sombre recollections from Austrian victims of Nazism, with contributions from Hartheim Castle, the site of a notorious Nazi-era facility near Linz where those deemed mentally or physically inferior were tortured and killed. This project is privately supported by an anonymous donor.
Although most of the Mediathek’s users (particularly those who visit its Gumpendorfer Straße centre) are historians, students, musicians and journalists, there are also some non-specialists who come along. In one particularly touching instance, a mother recently brought her daughter to watch a production of a theatre play she remembered from her own childhood. One might argue that this, rather than dry academic scholarship, is what the Mediathek is truly about and who it aims to reach: much like its Oral History series, it’s about ordinary people with their own memories and stories to share.