MICHAEL Loebenstein takes up the job of CEO at the National Film and Sound Archive in October, but he’s just been in Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne for a few days to get the feel of the place.

Just 37 years old, he’s the youngest in the line of cultural chiefs at our national institutions, with his own brand of keen, fast-talking charm, but it will be a steep learning curve as he learns how to survive in a bureaucracy.

Loebenstein has been head of the education and outreach department and a curator for special programs at the Austrian Film Museum, but that, he explains, is not a government entity. Though it gets its fair share of Austrian federal funding, it attracts substantial financial support from outside government.

He’s keen to see the National Film and Sound Archive (“the  NFSA” is what he’s been advised to call it, never “the archive”) take its place at the heart of the collecting institutions of Canberra.

Describing the 21st century as “the age of visual and aural cultures,” Loebenstein puts his reputation as a digital whiz kid down to his hands-on involvement with “rich media” — interactive multimedia — in the mid-1990s.

That, he admits, was at the time when DVD-ROM was the emerging technology. Now the possibilities are much wider. Although keen about new media as a means to opening up access, he believes that they are essentially “tools” and avows “a great respect for earlier media.”

He laments the trend some years ago for digitalising everything and destroying original films and tapes.

“We need to be very, very conscious of film preservation…now the principle is not to harm originals,” he says.

Last week documentary maker and NFSA board member Andrew Pike told “CityNews” of Loebenstein’s “entrepreneurial flair.”

It’s a description he embraces enthusiastically, explaining that he’s done hundreds of presentations on material, enjoys talking to people, and that he and his classically-trained pianist wife, Elaine, look forward to getting involved in the Canberra community with its reputation for being passionate about the arts.

Loebenstein has been waiting on his hotly sought-after position for some time. Respected throughout the world as one of the top preservation centres in the world, (“this is a fact,” he says) the NFSA, was exhaustive in its search for a new CEO, so he’s relieved that’s over.

While Loebenstein has been praised by the NFSA Chairman Chris Puplick for his cutting-edge digital expertise, he eagerly anticipates making himself known  around the country, including more distant states and territories.

“My focus will be on ‘real people’,” he says.