Hana Beckerle and Spencer Zidarich of the Library’s Collections Digitization Division (CDD) have been named as the Library of Congress co-leads for the Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) Still Image Working Group, effective July 1, 2025. In their new roles, they will provide leadership and direction for the working group, coordinate group meetings and projects, and represent the Library serving as liaisons on still image digitization issues.
The Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) Audiovisual Working Group has released a revised version of its popular resource, Significant Properties for Digital Video. This updated resource dives 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.
The Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) AudioVisual Working Group has returned to a schedule of two hybrid meetings a year, in addition to virtual working subgroup meetings as needed. In the past year, these meetings have include trips to the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center and to the Smithsonian Library and Archives’ new Audiovisual Media Preservation Initiative (AVMPI) digitization and processing space. This working group has also published new guidelines: Guidelines for IRENE System Products for Long Term Retention: Deliverable Packages for Imaged Audio Systems and Guidelines for Embedding Metadata in WebVTT Files. Recent work also included open-source software development and maintenance for BWF MetaEdit, FFmpeg, and vrecord. More exciting projects for 2024 are coming.
The Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) AudioVisual Working Group partnered with a consultant and accessibility firm on a project to enhance accessibility in open-source desktop applications for the digital preservation community. This blog post provides information on the applications tested, the issues found, and the technical guidelines and community recommendations to come out of this research.
The digital preservation landscape is ever-evolving, and the Library of Congress has recently made a significant update to its Recommended Formats Statement (RFS), to upgrade FFV1 (version 3) in Matroska (.mkv) container from an "Acceptable Format" to one of five "Preferred Formats" for the preservation and long-term access of video materials, reflecting its ongoing commitment to staying at the forefront of audiovisual preservation.
