User:Lea.E.Kel/sandbox

Identification (identifiers and descriptive metadata)

In digital preservation and collection management, discovery and identification of objects is aided by the use of assigned identifiers and accurate descriptive metadata.

Moving image preservation

The term "moving images" includes analog film and video and their born-digital forms: digital video, digital motion picture materials, and digital cinema. As analog videotape and film become obsolete, digitization has become a key preservation strategy, although many archives do continue to perform photochemical preservation of film stock.^[100][101]

"Digital preservation" has a double meaning for audiovisual collections: analog originals are preserved through digital reformatting, with the resulting digital files preserved; and born-digital content is collected, most often in proprietary formats that pose problems for future digital preservation.

According to Caroline Frick in 2014, "despite significant efforts of the Library of Congress, professional associations, and key university libraries, particularly New York University, a national movement to preserve video has not yet materialized".

There is currently no broadly accepted standard target digital preservation format for analog moving images.^[102] The complexity of digital video as well as the varying needs and capabilities of an archival institution are reasons why no "one-size-fits-all" format standard for long-term preservation exists for digital video like there is for other types of digital records "(e.g., word-processing converted to PDF/A or TIFF for images)".

Frick contends, however, that "librarians and archivists invested in maintaining video collections have always known that the preservation of audiovisual materials requires much more than merely putting objects in cold storage. Moving image media must be projected and played, moved and shown. Born-digital materials require a similar approach".

The following resources offer information on analog to digital reformatting and preserving born-digital audiovisual content.

• The Library of Congress tracks the sustainability of digital formats, including moving images.^[103]
• The Digital Dilemma 2: Perspectives from Independent Filmmakers, Documentarians and Nonprofit Audiovisual Archives (2012).^[102] The section on nonprofit archives reviews common practices on digital reformatting, metadata, and storage. There are four case studies.
• Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative (FADGI). Started in 2007, this is a collaborative effort by federal agencies to define common guidelines, methods, and practices for digitizing historical content. As part of this, two working groups are studying issues specific to two major areas, Still Image and Audio Visual.^[104]
• PrestoCenter publishes general audiovisual information and advice at a European level. Its online library has research and white papers on digital preservation costs and formats.^[105]
• The Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) sponsors conferences, symposia, and events on all aspects of moving image preservation, including digital. The AMIA Tech Review contains articles reflecting current thoughts and practices from the archivists' perspectives. Video Preservation for the Millennia (2012), published in the AMIA Tech Review, details the various strategies and ideas behind the current state of video preservation.^[106]

AMIA conference session topics over the last decade have shown, despite the ubiquity of digital video, that "professional AV preservationists have largely viewed digital technologies as an access tool for analog material". Frick states that "preservation for born-digital data, while an enormous concern, largely remains outside of the central discourse in the field, indicating a growing disconnect between those trained in moving image archiving and the contemporary world of digital preservation and asset management".

Codecs and containers

Moving images require a codec for the decoding process; therefore, determining a codec is essential to digital preservation. In "A Primer on Codecs for Moving Image and Sound Archives: 10 Recommendations for Codec Selection and Management" written by Chris Lacinak and published by AudioVisual Preservation Solutions, Lacinak stresses the importance of archivists choosing the correct codec as this can "impact the ability to preserve the digital object". Therefore, the codec selection process is critical, "whether dealing with born digital content, reformatting older content, or converting analog materials". Lacinak's ten recommendations for codec selection and management are the following: adoption, disclosure, transparency, external dependencies, documentation and metadata, pre-planning, maintenance, obsolescence monitoring, maintenance of the original, and avoidance of unnecessary trans-coding or re-encoding. There is a lack of consensus to date among the archival community as to what standard codec should be used for the digitization of analog video and the long-term preservation of digital video nor is there a single “right” codec for a digital object; each archival institution must "make the decision as part of an overall preservation strategy".

A digital container format or wrapper is also required for moving images and must be chosen carefully just like the codec. According to an international survey conducted in 2010 of over 50 institutions involved with film and video reformatting, "the three main choices for preservation products were AVI, QuickTime (.MOV) or MXF (Material Exchange Format)". These are just a few examples of containers. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has chosen the AVI wrapper as its standard container format for several reasons including that AVI files are compatible with numerous open source tools such as VLC.

According to Emanuel Lorrain in 2014, "uncertainty as to how formats will or will not become the future standard makes it difficult to commit to one codec and one container." Lorrain contends that choosing a format should "be a trade off for which the best quality requirements and long-term sustainability are ensured."

Considerations for content creators

By considering the following steps, content creators and archivists can ensure better accessibility and preservation of moving images in the long term:

• Create uncompressed video if possible. While this does create large files, their quality will be retained. Storage must be considered with this approach.
• If uncompressed video is not possible, use lossless instead of lossy compression. The compressed data gets restored while lossy compression alters data and quality is lost.
• Use higher bit rates (This affects resolution of the image and size of file.)
• Use technical and descriptive metadata.
• Use containers and codecs that are stable and widely used within the archival and digital preservation communities.

Article evaluation: Digital preservation

Content: I think more could be added regarding metadata (descriptive and technical). Nothing is mentioned in this article about codecs. The codec/format of digital videos is important for digital preservation but it is not mentioned at all under the "moving image preservation" section. Information about this is what I am interested in contributing to the article.

Only one sentence is written under several headings. This presents an opportunity to add more content to sections in this article.

Tone:

Wording. Might edit "difficult" to challenging. Difficult sounds biased. Other than that, the tone seems neutral.

Sources:

The links that I checked did work. I checked a citation under the "strategies" section. The source is OCLC which is reputable. This particular citation, however, seemed to be pulled directly from the source, word-for-word.

I have noticed that the digital preservation article contains "plagiarism of cited sources". I plan on checking more citations and removing any plagiarism that I find. I will add citations, rewrite in my own words or edit to add quotations.

Talk page:

Many of the comments seem to be from 2006. Someone brought up a good point that the introduction section seemed repetitive. This presents another opportunity for me to edit this. For a lot of the comments, there doesn't seem to be too many replies. Many editors who have left comments on the talk page posing questions but no one has responded with answers.

References

Frick, C. (2014). “Separate but Equal?”: Bolstering Audiovisual Preservation. Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture, 43(1/2), 20–25. doi:10.1515/pdtc-2014-1004

McDonough, J. & Jimenez, M. (2006). Video Preservation and Digital Reformatting: Pain and Possibility. Journal of Archival Organization, 4(1/2), 167–191. doi:10.1300/J201v04n01-09

April 1, 2010. Codecs primer for archives. Information Standards Quarterly, 22(2), 63-63. Retrieved from Library & Information Science Source.

https://siarchives.si.edu/what-we-do/digital-curation/recommended-preservation-formats-electronic-records

https://www.avpreserve.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/AVPS_Codec_Primer.pdf *

http://www.digitizationguidelines.gov/guidelines/FADGI_BDV_p3_20141202.pdf*
https://www.archives.gov/preservation/formats/audio-video-resources

https://www.records.nsw.gov.au/recordkeeping/advice/choosing-codec-for-digitising-audio-or-video

https://www.scart.be/?q=en/content/short-guide-choosing-digital-format-video-archiving-masters