Sustainable Information Part Two: Digital Preservation of Audio-Visual Content

Introduction

Planning for Video Preservation Services at Harvard

Nearly all of the major Harvard Library repositories count video (both analog and digital) among their valued holdings, though in many cases these materials are hidden from the scholarly community due to lack of resources for cataloging and processing. At the same time, these resources are at high risk of being lost because of format obsolescence, disappearing reproduction technologies, degrading physical media, and data corruption and loss. For media collections, there is only a small window of time globally in which to address preservation. Without a preservation intervention plan implemented in the next fifteen years, many of Harvard’s video resources will disappear.

This presentation will focus on the planning efforts and decisions that have been made in the early stages of establishing video reformatting and preservation services at the university. It will cover format, metadata and tool analysis, as well as an investigation of the potential impacts on the current digitization, reformatting, ingest and storage infrastructure.

AXF: Finally a Storage and Preservation Standard for the Ages

Rather than rely on archaic or proprietary approaches, recent domain-specific advancements in the area of open standards based, long-term data storage have been made helping ensure long-term preservation and universal accessibility for valuable file-based assets and collections.

This presentation will give a detailed technical overview of the recently published SMPTE Archive eXchange Format (AXF) standard. Born out of the Big Data-centric pedigree of the Media and Entertainment industry, AXF is applicable to all aspects of file-based asset preservation now and into the future. In sharp contrast to other approaches such as TAR and LTFS, AXF was designed from the ground up with the goals of asset transport as well as long-term storage and preservation. AXF future-proofs digital content repositories by embracing key OAIS preservation philosophies and abstracting the underlying operating system, file system and storage technology so that content remains available no matter how each evolves.

A history of the development of AXF highlighting its recent standardization will be given along with a detailed overview of the technology and its key features as contrasted with other non-standard approaches such as LTFS. End-user success stories will focus attention on the key features of the AXF standard and how it can be leveraged to ensure open access, long-term protection, and transportability of file-based asset and collections now and into the future.

An Open-Source Preservation Solution: Hydra/Blacklight