Category: file formats

Office Opens up with OOXML

The following is a guest post by Carl Fleischhauer, a Digital Initiatives Project Manager in the Office of Strategic Initiatives. We are pleased to announce the publication of nine new format descriptions on the Library’s Format Sustainability Web site. This is a closely related set, each of which pertains to a member of the Office […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Comparing Formats for Still Image Digitizing: Part One

The following is a guest post by Carl Fleischhauer, a Digital Initiatives Project Manager in NDIIPP. The Still Image Working Group within the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) recently posted a comparison of a few selected digital file formats.  We sometimes call these target formats: they are the output format that you reformat to.  In […]