Meeting in Manila early last December, the audio-visual archivists focused on determining the types of materials that would be included in the projected ASEAN Catalogue of film and television productions as well as access policies for regional exchange.

The ASEAN Catalogue will be made available as a publication and as a database linked with the ASEANWEB. The project is an initiative of the ASEAN COCI implemented by the Philippine Information Agency (PIA) and the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) of Australia under the ASEAN-Australia cooperation programme.

The AV archivists agreed to develop and maintain Merged Audio-Visual Information System (MAVIS) which will be monitored by the Southeast Asia-Pacific Audio-Visual Archives Association (SEAPAVAA), an association of archive institutions and professional archivists.

Mavis is a system developed by the NFSA to manage the records of audio-visual collections. During the meeting, the archivists tried their hand on the use of MAVIS in computer-cataloguing film and TV production data.

The idea of standardizing film and video cataloguing practices for regional exchange was first recommended in the ASEAN Conference-Workshop on Film Archiving in January 1993. A consensus to put out a regional catalogue was formed at the ASEAN Seminar on Film and Video Collection Development, Cataloguing and Control in Canberra in 1996.