July 26, 2010 -- The Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative is a collaborative effort to define common guidelines, methods and practices to digitize historical content. The initiative considers two groups of content: still images and audio-visual materials.
Carl Fleischhauer, a program officer for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program and coordinator of the audio-visual effort, presents an overview (PDF) of digitization practices with an emphasis on file formats. The article originally appeared in the Spring 2010 issue of Information Standards Quarterly (external link), and is now available on the FADGI website.
Fleischhauer’s article provides an overview of current digital reformatting practices for audio-visual records, describing how embedded metadata works for preservation, and also highlighting the complexity of the operation and the importance of shared formatting standards. He also details some of the work that the Audio-Visual Working Group has done regarding standards for embedding descriptive metadata into WAVE files.
The article also discusses BWF MetaEdit, a software package developed by AudioVisual Preservation Solutions to easily edit and embed metadata, thus making it simpler for groups working with digital sound files to meet the WAVE metadata guidelines put forth by the Audio-Visual Working Group. This software is available on SourceForge (external link).
