FASHIONOFFICE INSIGHT
by publisher Karin Sawetz
Nov 2008


Evanescence

Is an online publication an evanescent media; are the contents fading away like the leaves on a river because they are not printed?

Or is the internet the better bibliotheca? Not inflammable or destructible like the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, built in the 3rd century BC, and lost in antiquity - sometime between the 1st and 7th century AD?

Democracy of Knowledge

Fact is that today libraries are working on the digitalisation of cultural heritage such as old daily newspapers and magazines to serve the knowledge of written text through the internet and deliver it to people around the world.

One of the most important bibliotheca of the world, the Austrian National Library (founded in the Middle Ages www.onb.ac.at), offers insight into the society of the last centuries through the journalistic eye of daily newspaper reporters and magazine editors from the 19th/20th century. This year even the Austrian legislation has recognized that online publisher produce historical documents which have to be conserved for future generations. The National Library is working on concepts for storing important (Austrian or for Austria relevant) online documents. You can imagine that this order is neither quantitative (technical storage of the immense data volume) nor qualitative (what shall be stored without harming the privacy of users and when has content to be copied considering property rights of online publishers?) easy to fulfill.

Search Engines

Today, when I am reading a printed media without my computer on my side, I miss search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, ... They make it easy to find information, especially for checking back facts about when a fashion show was hold in Paris, London, New York, ... what other colleagues are writing about collections and which information is already online and what themes of a collection are not bespoken yet. By the way: never before it was made so obvious if journalists copy!

But I see new problems online which I don't want to hide. So you will not get the chance to search in the archives of fashionoffice.org with the installed Google-search on FashionAvigator.com (the search-channel of the magazine). For many keywords results from selected directories will be first ranked although no relevant information can be found on these sites. For other keywords you will find absolutely nothing, even non relevant information.

We know that this is the current situation of standardized and - 'cert'ainly - checked web servers which can be found all over the world. But I am afraid that these are the digital flames of today's libraries.

Fashionoffice.org celebrates 12 years top-relevance in 'fashion'

On occasion of the 10th anniversary of Google and the search in the oldest available Google-index, Fashionoffice.org is proud to celebrate 12 years top-relevance in 'fashion'.

With the anniversary-search of Google.com in their oldest available index (January 2001 google.com/search2001.html) you will find out that the magazine ranked with the "mother" of all Fashionoffice channels fashion.at on the 3rd place of about 6,840,000 results for ‘fashion’. Today, the magazine is still on the first site of 450,000,000 results on worldwide searches for ‘fashion’ in Google.

Founded in 1995 with the extensive “FashionAvigator”-study about fashion online, Fashionoffice was in 1996 one of the first fashion magazines exclusively published online. Soon the magazine has established special channels about fashion, art, luxury and beauty and received several prizes such as the ‘Angel of Fashion Award’ in 1996. Read more>>>

The history of online fashion magazines: Lookonline.com publisher Earnest Schmatolla in conversation with Fashionoffice.org publisher Karin Sawetz.


more fashion.at/mobile>>>

fig.: On the picture you can see me at the Wien Fluss during a walk through the Viennese Stadtpark on a beautiful windy autumn day.

An Example for Storage in Earlier Times

In earlier days the knowledge stored in books had been secured mainly by religious organisations.

It is not only because I like my first name and my Saint patron Saint Catherine of Alexandria, but I think the following story is interesting because it shows how difficult it could be getting information without the internet:

Saint Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai (where Moses received the Ten Commandments from God), was built between 548 and 565. The monastery library preserves the second largest collection of early codices and manuscripts in the world, outnumbered only by the Vatican Library. Unfortunately you will not get the chance to enter this library as easy as searching the internet; except you enjoy riding on a camel through the heat of the desert and climbing up a mountain, running 3600 steps because you thought the library is in a chapel, running back, reaching the monastery's library, where you will only get entrance with a special permission from the competent authority ...

Yes, I love the internet for easy searching and finding relevant information.

Each year on 25th November the monks of the monastery celebrate Saint Catherine with a festive procession en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Catherine's_Monastery,_Mount_Sinai.

Dr. Karin Sawetz, founder and publisher of fashionoffice.org (since 1996), is journalist, media researcher and fashion scientist.

Karin Sawetz has a diploma from a higher-level secondary college for the fashion and clothing industry. She was awarded with the first prize for her design of the male work trousers for the OMV filling stations (OMV is Central Europe's leading oil and gas group) - the design has been realised. Before and while studying for the diploma she was designer for her own label, which she has presented international.
Beneath her studies at the University of Vienna she worked as costume designer for theatre and film, was civil servant at the Austrian Federal Ministry of Economics (Department Fashion & Textile Industry), ...
After she has finished her studies at the Institute for Journalism and Communication Sciences, the Institute for Film-, Theatre- and Media-Sciences, the Institute for Philosophy at the University of Vienna, and the Institute for Artistic Sciences, Art Education and Communication, Department for Cultural and Intellectual History, at the University of Applied Arts, she was lecturer at the University of Vienna and the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, published scientific studies, ...
In the last years she focused her work on fashionoffice.org as an international magazine and organization for intercultural approaches in fashion and art.


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