Please forward to the appropriate lists.

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Moving Images and Sound Archiving Study - final draft available for public
consultation

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 addition, 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, the 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 study is now complete and a copy of the draft
final report is available for public consultation at
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=project_movingimagesound. Comments and
feedback are invited till 31 July 2006, which will be considered and
incorporated into the final report.

Please send your comments to Sheila Anderson at the AHDS
([log in to unmask]) or Helen Hockx-Yu at JISC
([log in to unmask]).

Helen Hockx-Yu
Programme Manager
JISC Office, Kings College London
Strand Bridge House (3rd Floor)
138-142 Strand
London WC2R 1HH
Tel: 020 7848 1803
Mobile: 07813 024633