Formats

The project to compare video formats for reformatting is being led by the National Archives and Records Administration with significant input from the Library of Congress. The resulting matrixes offer comparisons of the wrappers AVI, MOV (QuickTime), Matroska, MXF, and MPEG-2 (ad hoc file wrapper), and the following encodings: uncompressed (various types), lossless JPEG 2000, ffv1, and MPEG-2 (encoding). The Working Group's starting point is a useful 2011 report by George Blood for the Library of Congress titled Determining Suitable Digital Video Formats for Medium-term Storage.

December 10, 2014 1:00 p.m. - 2:30 p.m. (Eastern Time)

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 target formats: they are the output format that you reformat to.

The International Image Interoperability Framework community (http://iiif.io/) is hosting a one day information sharing event about the use of images in and across Cultural Heritage institutions. The day will focus on how museums, galleries, libraries and archives, or any online image service, can take advantage of a powerful technical framework for interoperability between image repositories.

Access to image-based resources is fundamental to research, scholarship and the transmission of cultural knowledge. Digital images are a container for much of the information content in the Web-based delivery of images, books, newspapers, manuscripts, maps, scrolls, single sheet collections, and archival materials. Yet much of the Internet’s image-based resources are locked up in silos, with access restricted to bespoke, locally built applications.

Shannon Mattern discusses the aesthetics of preservation at the annual Digital Preservation meeting.

Four "lightning" presentations on Day Two of the Digital Preservation 2014 meeting included "Visual Haggard and Digitizing Illustration" (Kate Halterhoff, Carnegie-Mellon University), "DuraSpace and Chronopolis Partner to Build a Long-term Access and Preservation Platform" (Michele Kimpton, DuraSpace), "Library of Congress Recommended Format Specifications: Encouraging Preservation Without Discouraging Creation" (Theron Westervelt, Library of Congress) and "Electronic Records and Digital Archivists: A Landscape Review" (Jane Zhang, Catholic University of America).

Five "lightning" presentations on Day One of the Digital Preservation 2014 meeting included "Beyond the Russian Doll Effect: Reflexivity and the Digital Repository Paradigm" (James Bradley, Ball State University), "Video Game Source Disc Preservation" (David Gibson, Library of Congress), "UELMA-Compliant Preservation: Questions and Answers?" (Rebecca Katz, Council of the District of Columbia), "We Want You Just the Way You Are: The What, Why and When of Fixity in Digital Preservation" (Kate Murray, Library of Congress) and "Save Your Databases Using SIARD!" (Krystyna Ohnesorge, Swiss Federa

Brown Dog is designed to convert defunct computer files into accessible formats, preserving information in those files for generations to come. This means that one may no longer need a patchwork of computer applications to use scientific datasets, read old thesis papers or access family videos uploaded onto the Internet.

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 a great deal of thought and research into listing the formats, there is still one more important component needed for the project: the Library of Congress needs suggestions from you.