Digital Video Preservation Reformatting Project Report

The Dance Heritage Coalition has published a report on their Digital Video Preservation Reformatting Project. The report examines the suitability of a variety of popular digital compression schemes as a potential preservation format by applying them to various types of dance footage. Topics include lossy versus lossless compression, file wrappers, and an analysis of various codecs applied to dance footage.

The report can be found at:
http://tinyurl.com/5ydxc

Sustainable Preservation of Digital Assets in a University

The report and papers from eSPIDA's workshop held in February are now available. The event's aim was as to launch eSPIDA and create a level of awareness about sustainable digital preservation. The speakers opened up new lines of enquiry for digital preservation. The economic considerations offered by Professor Jane Hunter in particular resonated strongly; this is a new way of thinking for many in the field. The event contained lively discussions about digital assets, roles and responsibilities within an Institution towards them, drivers for preserving them and a whole manner of associated topics and these are brought out in the report.

http://www.gla.ac.uk/espida/events.shtml

New Digital Preservation Coalition Report

The British Library were invited to prepare a report on mass archival storage, based on their own practical experience in developing their Digital Object Management system. Jim Linden, Sean Martin, Richard Masters and Roderic Parker authored the document and are all part of the BL's Digital Object Management (DOM) Programme at Boston Spa.

The report includes an overview of general issues related to building a large secure data storage system and includes discussion of what needs to be taken into account before the Total Cost of Ownership can be calculated.

While based on the BL's experience, as the report indicates: Our long-term needs are far from unique.

This document will be enormously valuable to all those who are engaged in, or planning for, secure long-term storage of large volumes of digital materials.

The report can be found here: http://www.dpconline.org/graphics/reports

Welcome to DAVA, the Digital Audiovisual Archiving Blog!

Hello, and welcome to DAVA, the Digital Audiovisual Archiving blog. It's intended to be a locus of information for topics related to the transformation and preservation of audiovisual material. Sample topics include encoding, storage, metadata, provenance, rights, automation, and restoration. While this blog will focus mainly on audiovisual media items, many of the topics will have application to digital library objects in general.

This blog is administered by Media Matters, a digital archiving consultancy based in New York.