"Never Best Practices: Born-Digital Audiovisual Preservation"

Julia Kim, Rebecca Fraimow and Erica Titkemeyer have published "Never Best Practices: Born-Digital Audiovisual Preservation" in Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

The sheer conditionality of [born-digital audiovisual file preservation] recommendations leaves practitioners mired in a sea of questions as they struggle to set realistically adhered to policies for their institutions. Should files be accepted as-is, or transcoded to an open and standardized format? When is transcoding to a preservation file specification worth the extra storage space and staff time? If transcoding, what are the ideal target specifications? When developing policies and workflows for batch transcoding a variety of different formats, each with different technical specifications, how do you make sure that preservation files maintain all the perceptible, let alone "significant" characteristics of the original files?

This paper presents case studies from three institutions—a university special collections library, a federal government department, and a public broadcasting station—demonstrating how the factors listed above might lead to 'tiered' processing and decision-making around 'good enough' practices for the preservation of born-digital a/v files.

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Author: Charles W. Bailey, Jr.

Charles W. Bailey, Jr.