When Kathleen O’Neill talks about digital collections, she slips effortlessly into the info-tech language that software engineers, librarians, archivists and other information technology professionals use to communicate with each other. O’Neill, a senior archives specialist in the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Division, speaks with authority about topics such as file signatures, hex editors and checksums even […]
Category: audiovisual file formats
All in the (Apple ProRes 422 Video Codec) Family
We’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about digital video issues. As mentioned in a previous blog post, the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative published several reports on this topic including “Creating and Archiving Born Digital Video.” Work on the “Eight Federal Case Histories” (PDF) report nudged us to add the Apple ProRes 422 […]
Digital Audio Preservation at MIT: an NDSR Project Update
The following is a guest post by Tricia Patterson, National Digital Stewardship Resident at MIT Libraries This month marks the mid-way point of my National Digital Stewardship Residency at MIT Libraries, a temporal vantage point that allows me to reflect triumphantly on what has been achieved so far and peer fearlessly ahead at all that […]
New FADGI Report: Creating and Archiving Born Digital Video
As part of a larger effort to explore file formats, the Born Digital Video subgroup of the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative Audio-Visual Working Group is pleased to announce the release of a new four-part report, “Creating and Archiving Born Digital Video.” This report has already undergone review by FADGI members and invited colleagues including […]
Comparing Formats for Video Digitization
The following is a guest post by Carl Fleischhauer, a Digital Initiatives Project Manager in the Office of Strategic Initiatives. FADGI format comparison projects. The Audio-Visual Working Group within the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative recently posted a comparison of a few selected digital file formats for consideration when reformatting videotapes. We sometimes call these […]
WITNESS: Digital Preservation (in Plain Language) as a Tool for Justice
Some of you information professionals may have experienced incidents where, in the middle of a breezy conversation, you get caught off guard by a question about your work (“What do you do?”) and you struggle to come up with a straightforward, clear answer without losing the listener’s attention or narcotizing them into a stupor with […]
Audio for Eternity: Schüller and Häfner Look Back at 25 Years of Change
The following is a guest post by Carl Fleischhauer, a Digital Initiatives Project Manager in the Office of Strategic Initiatives. During the first week of October, Kate Murray and I participated in the annual conference of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives in Cape Town, South Africa. Kate’s blog describes the conference. This blog […]
Convergence of Audiovisual Archivists in the ‘Fairest Cape’: A Report of the 2014 IASA Conference
Upon seeing the Cape of Good Hope near Cape Town, South Africa, for the first time in 1580, Sir Francis Drake wrote in his diary that “this cape is the most stately thing and the fairest cape we saw in the whole circumference of the earth” And I have to say that I agree. In […]
QCTools: Open Source Toolset to Bring Quality Control for Video within Reach
In this interview, part of the Insights Interview series, FADGI talks with Dave Rice and Devon Landes about the QCTools project. In a previous blog post, I interviewed Hannah Frost and Jenny Brice about the AV Artifact Atlas, one of the components of Quality Control Tools for Video Preservation, an NEH-funded project which seeks to […]
Preliminary Results for the Ranking Stumbling Blocks for Video Preservation Survey
In a previous blog post, the NDSA Standards and Practices Working Group announced the opening of a survey to rank issues in preserving video collections. The survey closed on August 2, 2014 and while there’s work ahead to analyze the results and develop action plans, we can share some preliminary findings. We purposely cast a […]