 

Federal Agencies
Digitization Guidelines Initiative

About This Initiative

Started in 2007, this is a collaborative effort by federal agencies to define common guidelines, methods, and practices for digitizing historical content.   As part of this, two working groups are studying issues specific to two major areas, Still Image and Audio Visual.

Learn more about the initiative

Still Image
Working Group

This group is involved in a cooperative effort to develop common digitization guidelines for still image materials.

Audio-Visual
Working Group

The goal for this working group is to identify, establish, and disseminate information about standards and practices for the digital reformatting of audio-visual materials.

Digitization Guidelines
  • Digitizing Motion Picture Film: Exploration of the Issues and Sample SOW
    Approved by Working Group | April 18, 2016

    The FADGI Audio-Visual Working Group's report on motion picture film scanning combines an introductory essay, a set of tables that describe a range of film "inputs" and digital "outputs," and concludes with a model statement of work for outsourced conversion of film to video.

  • Audio Analog-to-Digital Converter Performance
    Review draft for comment | Comments requested by May 30, 2016

    Comments requested for ADC guideline version 1.1 that concerns metrics and measurement methods for analog-to-digital converters. Other reports linked from this page describe the problem of interstitial errors, i.e., accidental loss or transformations of audio samples within the digitizing system before the data stream is written to file.

  • Technical Guidelines for the Still Image Digitization of Cultural Heritage Materials
    Review draft for comment | Comments requested by December 1, 2015

    Creation of Raster Image Master Files represents shared best practices followed by agencies participating in the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) Still Image Working Group for digitizing cultural heritage material.

  • MXF Application Specification for Moving Image and other Audio-Visual Content
    Review draft for comment | Comments requested by December 31, 2015

    A revised version of the MXF Application Specification for Archiving and Preservation, called AS-07 under the auspices of the Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA), is available for public comment. The detailed AS-07 file "wrapper" specification intended to serve reformatting programs includes a list of permitted encoded essences (the underlying content bitstreams), defines a means for the carriage of multiple timecodes; the handling of captions, subtitles, and Timed Text; a minimal core metadata set; program segmentation metadata; and embedded content integrity data.

  • File Format Comparison Projects
    Posted by both Working Groups  | December 2, 2014

    Comparisons of file formats for still-image reformatting, video reformatting, and preservation-oriented treatment of born digital video.  For the reformatting examples, matrixes are used to compare formats in terms of about forty factors.  For born digital  video, current practices in six federal agencies are described in case histories.  The offerings include narrative explanatory documents and supplementary reports.

  • Embedding Metadata in Broadcast WAVE Files
    Approved by Working Group | April 23, 2012

    Version 2 of the guideline for metadata to be embedded in Broadcast WAVE files that reproduce historical and cultural heritage digital sound recordings.

All digitization guidelines

News & Events

Recent blogs:

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Resources

The following are provided as resources for the digitization of both audio-visual and still image digital content.

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Last Updated: 05/24/2016
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