Start date: 1 September 2005
End date: 31 May 2006
Funding programme: Digital Preservation and Records Management Programme
JISC theme(s): Information environment
The last decade has witnessed a rapid growth in the creation of a variety
of digital sound and moving pictures formats. The prominence of the World
Wide Web and growth in digital technologies has enabled users to create,
download, and manipulate these born-digital files. Digital art forms are
emerging from these multimedia technologies, and large scale use of digital
film and music files has become a prominent feature of our cultural and
intellectual life. Another focus over the last few years has been the
conversion of analogue sound and film resources to digital format. Digital
library technology now enables large, rare film and audio collections to be
digitised. The scholarly and educational community has made particular use
of this new media, which is playing an increasingly important role in
learning, teaching and research.
The long term preservation of moving images and sound resources however is
challenging to approach, primarily due to their complex nature. Despite
substantial research into digital preservation in the UK over the last few
years, relatively little attention has been paid to the long-term
durability and accessibility of multimedia files. In additon, development
of technical solutions and agreed metadata sets lags behind that of other
resource types. While much of the preservation knowledge base centres
around static digital files, it is essential that the HE /FE community is
aware of the issues of preservation for a whole range of file types,
especially complex multi-object files types, such as moving pictures
files.
Over the past few years, JISC has funded a series of feasibility studies
which aim to assess the preservation risk and retention criteria for
digital content, and to help inform and prioritise the development of
future services and calls in digital preservation. The Moving Images and
Sound Archiving Study forms part of the feasibility study programme and has
been funded to understand more fully the preservation challenges of digital
moving image and sound files, to scope the preservation requirements and to
determine archiving methodologies and future research directions. The
study was conducted from September 2005 to May 2006 by a team from the Arts
and Humanities Data Service (AHDS), the BBC Archives in the person of
Richard Wright, and King's College Digital Consultancy Services in the
person of Simon Tanner.
The final report:
Moving Digital Images and Sound Archiving Study.