Curating for manifold use in a digital world

Field recordings are usually made for particular research purposes but as archival
holdings, they are accessed for various reasons, including questions and purposes other than those envisioned by their collectors. An essential pre-condition for their accessibility and potential use is a description as comprehensive as possible. This paper focuses on archiving and cataloguing in a multidisciplinary audio-visual research archive. It discusses the benefit of producing detailed documentation in cooperation with the researchers while generating archival audio-visual items and their access copies. In addition, dissemination sometimes requires, and certainly benefits from, on-going collaboration with the collectors. Our "traditional" labour-intensive workflow, however, has to be adjusted to current challenges - technical developments of audio-visual recording, the constantly growing number of collections and legacies acquired, and the responsibilities towards international users and originating communities. Current efforts, problems and (possible) solutions here deal with the reprocessing of archival documentation for digitisation, and the English translation of the online catalogue, optimizing tools for metadata production in the field, and corresponding modifications of the archival database.