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| Digital information preservation |
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Q: What is the NDIIPP and what are its main objectives?
A: The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program is developing a national strategy to collect, archive, and preserve digital content for current and future generations. In part, this is an extension of the Library of Congress's traditional role of building a collection of information to serve the U.S. Congress and the American people, but in this case we are also working with others in and out of government.
The establishing legislation instructs us to work with federal agencies like the National Archives, the National Library of Medicine, and the National Agricultural Library, as well as other libraries and institutions, including "representatives of private business organizations which are involved in efforts to preserve, collect, and disseminate information in digital formats." That directive is one motivation for our cooperative work with a network of partners. The second motivation for organizing a collective effort is the sheer extent of digital content -- petabytes every year -- more than any one institution can acquire and preserve.
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Q: NDIIPP has a number of external partners -- who are they and what are their specialties?
A: The breadth of interest is reflected in our initial set of 130 partners, the organizations that get support from us on a matching basis. For example, the North Carolina State University Libraries and the North Carolina Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, working on geospatial content; state government agencies in Arizona, Minnesota, and Washington and several other states, working on the preservation of governmental documents and media in digital form; the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research, based at the University of Michigan, working with social science data sets; the supercomputer center at the University of California in San Diego, working on storage and storage management; and the Internet Archive, harvesting and preserving Web sites.
Moving image content is also very important to us. Two types of partners are exploring two types of issues: what happens in production and post production, and what happens when an archive collects broadcast content.
Q: What about moving image projects that concern content production and post production?
A: There are two. First, the Preserving Digital Public Television Project is led by WNET in New York, joined by WGBH in Boston, PBS in Alexandria, VA, and New York University. One of the topics they are working on concerns "packaging" for the archive. This is focused on the MPEG-2-based ATSC DTV formats in use today, specifically contribution files at 50 Mbps and distribution files at 8 Mbps. The project sees opportunities to improve industry practices in the realm of metadata, where they are refining the PBCore specification, and wrappers, where they wish to encourage increased adoption of MXF by producers, broadcasters, and technology vendors.
A second production-side project is the Digital Motion Picture Archival Project, being carried out by the Science and Technology Council at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles. The council is made up of academy members from the major studios, technology and support companies in Hollywood, and other experts. Since 2004, the council has been pursuing the standardization of production and archiving as the motion picture industry moves toward end-to-end digital production.
NDIIPP is supporting the continuation of that activity, with a special focus on independent film and the work of smaller archives. The centerpiece of the council's effort is the Image Interchange Framework, intended to enable workflows for high dynamic range, wide color gamut, high precision (4K/16-bit) content. The council plans to specify digital source and archival master formats, the "back room" formats that are processed and output as digital cinema files for distribution to theaters.
The focus in both production-oriented projects is on the high-end, high-quality elements that represent important assets for creators. Increased standardization in that area will produce real benefits for public archives that preserve older, historical holdings of video and film and which also seek high-quality, standardized approaches.
Q: Tell us about the work that concerns archives that collect broadcast content.
A: Different technologies are in play for the archives that collect large quantities of news "off air" and "off satellite." Like daily newspapers, the content value is the breadth and depth of coverage; everyone accepts that the circumstances preclude high image quality
. For several years, the Library's Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division has been working with the Vanderbilt University Television News Archive to build a collection of U.S. news broadcasts.
In a similar vein, the NDIIPP program is supporting the Foreign Television News Broadcast Project being carried out by SCOLA, a nonprofit in McClelland, IA. SCOLA harvests and retransmits television programming from about 90 countries around the world, including Al-Jazeera and programs from such nations as Pakistan, Russia, and the Philippines. They capture from satellites and also receive physical media sent from foreign contributors.
SCOLA serves educational-community subscribers, most of whom have a focus on the teaching of foreign languages, including the Defense Language Institute, part of the Department of Defense. NDIIPP support helps SCOLA refine and improve their archiving technologies. They are moving from the archiving of streaming-quality files (MPEG-4 encoding in a QuickTime wrapper at about 380 kbps) to higher quality files (MPEG-2 at 5 Mbps). At the same time, more is being done with metadata and the provision of tools to search the "backfile."
Q: Are there other video-related activities being pursued by NDIIPP?
A: We have formed the Federal Agencies Audio-Visual Digitization Working Group (there is also one for still images), with participation from the National Archives, National Libraries for Medicine and Agriculture, Smithsonian Institution, Voice of America, Defense Visual Information Directorate in the Department of Defense, and others. The goal is to identify and disseminate information about standards and practices pertaining to digital AV materials by federal agencies. The acceptance of a common body of digitization and digital content standards and practices will help set common benchmarks for service providers, support content preservation, and facilitate research. We are just getting rolling and there will be a Web site in a few weeks. Any interested federal agency is welcome to participate.
Q: What digital video formats does the Library of Congress consider to be sustainable, and what criteria are being applied to make this judgment?
A: We do not have firm answers at this time. In our analysis of digital formats (all types, not just video), we use seven sustainability factors as yardsticks:
disclosure (are the specifications public), adoption (is the format widely used), transparency (is the digital representation open to direct analysis with basic tools), self-documentation (can the digital file contain helpful metadata), external dependencies (does the format depend upon hardware or an operating system), impact of patents (will patents lead to high prices for software or slow the development of open source tools), and technical protection mechanisms (does the format permit creators to lock the content). There are also factors that pertain to a format's ability to address quality and functionality needs.
Choosing "best formats" for preservation entails looking for a balance between the all of the various sustainability, quality, and functionality factors. We have a format sustainability Web site with descriptions of about 200 formats and sub-formats of all types, not just AV. But we know that there are another two or three hundred formats we have not gotten to yet.
Regarding our assessment of video formats, we are learning from the partner projects I mentioned earlier, including the public television project's examination of MXF-wrapped MPEG-2 encodings for new programs. At the same time, the staff at the Library's new Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, VA, is reformatting historical videotapes into a different target format, one in which MXF wraps frame images encoded as lossless-compressed JPEG-2000. This promising approach provides excellent reproduction quality and is similar to the use of JPEG-2000 imaging in some new video cameras and in the digital cinema specification.
Q: What is the role of standards in digital video preservation?
A: Standards support interoperability. Standardized formatting permits a project to move from studio A to studio B and then to broadcaster C, each of whom may use different systems -- Avid here, Final Cut there, Omneon for playout. We think of preservation as a way to interoperate with the future, and we believe that the standardization of formatting supports that outcome.
We also believe that standardization decisions are best made by those who work with content on a daily basis, i.e., the members of the industry. They depend on interoperability today, and they are part of the give and take between content creators and the technology companies that build the tools. Learning about current developments, and participating in this give and take, is one of the benefits of the NDIIPP partner projects.
MORE INFO
NDIIPP digitalpreservation.gov
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