The Phonogrammarchiv is a multi-disciplinary research sound and video archive, covering holdings from all continents. Since its foundation in 1899 the Phonogrammarchiv has been building up its holdings by cooperating with Austrian scholars and archiving their collected material, or by fieldwork conducted by staff members on special topics exploring new fields of methods and contents. The main tasks comprise the production, annotation, cataloguing and long-term preservation of audio-visual field recordings, making the cultural heritage available for future generations and enabling the dissemination of the recordings as well as technical developments in the field of AV recording and storage. Thus the Phonogrammarchiv adds to infrastructural performance valuable to both the scholarly community and the public at large.