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FADGI’s 10th Anniversary: Adapting to Meet the Community’s Needs

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This is a guest post by Kate Murray, IT Specialist in the Library of Congress’s Digital Collections and Management Services.

FADGI logo
Note the dot over the “i” in Guidelines connects with the “g” in Agencies, which reflects FADGI’s collaborative ethos of working together and that guidelines should always intersect with agency needs.

Started in 2007 as a collaborative effort by federal agencies, FADGI has many accomplishments under its belt, including the widely implemented Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials (newly updated in 2016); open source software, including OpenDICE and AutoSFR and BWF MetaEdit; file format comparison projects; standards work, including the MXF AS-07 Application Specification and Sample Files; projects related to scanning motion picture film; embedded metadata in Broadcast Wave, DPX and TIFF (PDF) files and many more. Check out the handy summary chart (PDF) of our accomplishments, impacts and benefits to date.

Our 10th anniversary is 2017, so it’s a good time to think about a bit of an update as we head into our second decade.

First let’s talk about our name. “FADGI” (fah – jee), we readily admit, does not exactly roll off the tongue. But we’re a well-established brand name now so “FADGI” we stay but with an update. Up until now, the FADGI acronym stood for the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative because we’ve mainly been focused on developing technical guidelines, methods and practices for the digitization of historical content in a sustainable manner. In recent years however, the FADGI Still Image and Audio-Visual working groups have expanded their projects to include selected aspects of born-digital content alongside content reformatted through digitization.

FADGI 2.0 is now reborn as the Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative. Same acronym that we’ve grown to love, same great people (now up to 20 federal agencies) now with a new logo, updated website and expanded scope. FADGI will still focus on determining performance measures for digitization and develop methods for validation, recommending methods for digitization and exploring sustainable digital formats for still image and audiovisual material. But we’ll add some new ingredients to the mix, including recommending methods for creating and maintaining sustainable born-digital material. One example of this revised scope is the Creating and Archiving Born Digital Video project, which includes high-level recommended practices (PDF) for file creators.

More good news on the FADGI front is that our published guidelines will now carry the CC0 1.0 Universal license to declare unambiguously that the work is available for worldwide use and reuse. Because FADGI work is the product of US federal government personnel in the scope of their employment and therefore is not subject to copyright in the United States (17 U.S.C. §105), FADGI’s work products have always been in the public domain. The inclusion of the CC0 1.0 Universal license clarifies these statements for both US and international users of the FADGI guidelines.

All United States federal agencies and institutions involved in the creation or collection of digitized or born-digital content of a cultural, historical or archival nature are welcome to participate in FADGI. Please join us as we look forward to our next chapter and our next 10 years!

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