Digital preservation stands as one of the grand challenges of the early 21st Century. National libraries and archives from around the world are grappling with the preservation of digital assets. Funding agencies worldwide recognize the preservation imperative and are funding a wide array of research and development projects. As digital libraries and digitization initiatives have grown over the past decade, an increasing number of researchers, information professionals, and policy makers have addressed the issues around creating, maintaining, and, most recently, preserving digital objects. Although most of the preservation research to date has centered on text and still images, video is becoming a more common medium of expression for science and education and offers unique preservation challenges. This project builds on earlier work with digital video files and their surrogates (www.open-video.org), seeking ways in which to preserve a video work's context and highlighting its essence, thus making it more understandable and accessible to future generations. Long-term provision of contextualized access that makes digital objects understandable over time is essential to longterm preservation. This project will focus on developing a preservation framework for digital video context that can be used by archivists to make preservation decisions and guide the development of finding aids.The work will include a demonstration of this framework by applying it to two important digital video collections: the complete series of NASA broadcast educational videos and the complete set of juried ACM SIGCHI videos presented at annual conferences from 1983 to the present. The framework and demonstrable examples using the test collections will be made available to inform video archival decisions in the immediate years ahead.
Broader Impacts
This work will have several important outcomes for a variety of stakeholders. First, it will address the important context aspect of digital preservation on both theoretical and practical fronts. This should improve archival decision making and finding aid creation and suggest ways to leverage technology further to make them more efficient and effective. Second, this work will define preservation parameters for digital video, an increasingly important medium that has to date received little attention. Third, this work will have high payoff by focusing attention on two important and substantial collections of video content. These collections are already used in analog or broadcast forms by millions of students and teachers (NASA) and in analog or digital local forms by thousands of human-computer interaction students and faculty. The NASA videos in particular were created to encourage women and minority participation in science and broader and more effective availability will enhance this mission.. Fourth, this project will bring together diverse communities of practice ranging from academics in multiple disciplines to publishers to educational technologists. The synergies such crossdisciplinary collaborations offer will not only result in a more robust framework for preservation but will also produce better understanding of digital preservation issues across these different communities. Finally, this project will have substantial impact because it is tuned to the requirements of a new and innovative funding model.
