Today’s guest post is from Kate Murray of the Digital Collections Management & Services Division and co-leader of the FADGI Audiovisual Working Group.
The Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) Audiovisual Working Group has released a revised version of its popular resource, Significant Properties for Digital Video.
Initially inspired by the Significant Significant Properties work presented at iPRES2018, FADGI sought to delve deeper into the area of significant properties for digital video to provide definitions for common terms and how changes in these typical criteria would impact the digital video content, technical parameters and display.
FADGI first started this project in 2019 with a draft release – see the No Don’t You Ever Change: Essential Characteristics for Digital Video presentation at the No Time to Wait 4 conference for an overview of the early effort – but, due to a number of reasons, the work was not finalized until this year. In the intervening time, FADGI continued to hear about its value to the community and inclusion on syllabi and resources lists. In summer 2024, FADGI revisited the project to review and revise the resources into a more final, non-draft form. This work was completed and released in October 2024.
The technical parameters for digital video are complex but FADGI focused on a non-expert audience of mid-level practitioners, and not professional engineers. FADGI also scoped the work to document representative common parameters instead of aiming for a comprehensive run-through of all possible options. In short, FADGI followed a version of the “80/20 principle” in which the criteria explores what is found in typical digital video – the 80% of cases – rather than special cases – the 20% of outliers.
The 2024 release has several impactful improvements over the 2019 draft, all of which are fully documented in the Change Log. Aside from adjusting the criteria and definitions for clarity and readability, one of the new features is mapping of the significant properties to use cases at three federal agencies to better demonstrate how this data is used in current workflows. Other continuing features include providing plain language definitions for key criteria as well as typical values/examples of how the data is presented to help practitioners identify the values in reports and systems. These updated definitions will also be added to the well-used FADGI Glossary (which gets hundreds of hits a month). See, for example, the new glossary entry for frame rate. Another essential feature is an overview of the impact of change – what happens if the significant property is altered in some way over time or through migration.
Significant Properties for Digital Video is available for download as both a PDF and XLXS workbook. Each package includes three components: Significant Properties for Digital Video Criteria and Definitions, Comparing Significant Properties in Use Cases, and Resources and References. Like many FADGI projects, this work holds a CC0 1.0 Universal deed dedicating the work to the public domain.
Comments are welcome below or to [email protected].