The H K Thiele Archive (HKTA) is a collection of documents about audio and movie technologies reaching back to the very beginnings in the twentieth century.
Heinz K. Thiele (1914...2002) began his career as a future engineer during his time in school when radio broadcasting was introduced in Germany.
In 1936, after his studies and while being employed in one of the famous German optical companies, he began to systematically collect documents of audio and movie technology. This collection was in Dresden, and unfortunately was lost after World War II.
Despite this, he again started gathering documents in order to recover the lost documents and to continuously add new matter in the fast developing technology. In 1996 he devised a new classification system in order to ensure its usability into the future.
Heinz K. Thiele was member of German as well as international societies of audio-, movie-, and tv-technology. Since 1984 he was a fellow of the AES and one of the co-founders of AES Historical Committee. Since then his entire collection of historical documents have been at the disposal of the AES.
Due to his age, he donated his collection to Manfred Krause who assured him that he would continue his work to further satisfaction of AES HC. The H K Thiele Archive actually is located in the Technical University of Berlin, by courtesy of the University's administration.
Manfred Krause (68) is Professor of Communication Sciences (now retired) and was actively involved in teaching audio studio technology and speech signal processing. His future work with the HKTA is to transfer the huge mass of -paper information- into a data bank in order to make the information accessible via the homepage of AES.
Originally Prof. Krause and Susanne Matthey proposed using a Microsoft
"Access" database for accessing the HKTA, because these archives are so
large and complete. You can look at these preliminary demonstration
screens. This ACCESS data base does not meet the demands of the internet
optimally. Therefore a new SQL data base is now being prepared.
Rev a 2002-04-23
