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 […]
Category: digital formats
The Library of Congress Wants Your File Format Ideas
In June of this year, the Library of Congress announced a list of formats it would prefer for digital collections. This list of recommended formats is an ongoing work; the Library will be reviewing the list and making revisions for an updated version in June 2015. Though the team behind this work continues to put […]
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 […]
Untangling the Knot of CAD Preservation
At the 2014 Society of American Archivists meeting, the CAD/BIM Taskforce held a session titled “Frameworks for the Discussion of Architectural Digital Data” to consider the daunting matter of archiving computer-aided design and Building Information Modelling files. This was the latest evidence that — despite some progress in standards and file exchange — archivists and the […]
NDSA Standards and Practices Survey: Ranking Stumbling Blocks for Video Preservation
A new thread emerged during the recent monthly conference calls of the Standards and Practices Working Group of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA). What do we do about preserving video? It’s a problem for many of our members. One participant even commented that video is often the last content type to be added to […]
Saving the Date: Exploring Calendar and Scheduling Formats
Each January, my family picks out a new wall calendar to hang in our kitchen. Its main appeal these days is nostalgic decoration since we no longer use it to write down our appointments or important dates. Like many people, we now rely on electronic calendar and scheduling tools built into personal information manager software […]
Shaking the Email Format Family Tree
Recently, we’ve started to add email formats to the Sustainability of Digital Formats website. Eventually, when we get a more robust collection, we’d like to split them out into a separate content category but for now, they (mostly) are categorized with their closest cousin, the Textual Content family. Our genealogical research is still very much […]
It’s Not Just Integrity: Fixity Data in Digital Sound and Moving Image Files
This blog post is co-authored by Carl Fleischhauer, Project Manager, Digital Initiatives, Library of Congress. People who manage audio and video files over time, do create fixity data, aka hash values or checksums, to help monitor the condition of those files in storage and when moved from one system or media to another system or […]
Let’s Start at the Very Beginning: Guiding Principles for Creating Born Digital Video
The beginning is a very fine place to start indeed for the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative Born Digital Video subgroup of the Audio-Visual Working Group. As mentioned in a previous blog post, the FADGI Born Digital Video subgroup is taking a close look at the range of decisions to be made throughout the lifecycle […]