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Please forward to the appropriate lists. --------------------------------- Moving Images and Sound Archiving Study - final draft available for public consultation The last decade has witnessed a rapid growth in the creation of a variety of digital sound and moving pictures formats. The prominence of the World Wide Web and growth in digital technologies has enabled users to create, download, and manipulate these born-digital files. Digital art forms are emerging from these multimedia technologies, and large scale use of digital film and music files has become a prominent feature of our cultural and intellectual life. Another focus over the last few years has been the conversion of analogue sound and film resources to digital format. Digital library technology now enables large, rare film and audio collections to be digitised. The scholarly and educational community has made particular use of this new media, which is playing an increasingly important role in learning, teaching and research. The long term preservation of moving images and sound resources however is challenging to approach, primarily due to their complex nature. Despite substantial research into digital preservation in the UK over the last few years, relatively little attention has been paid to the long-term durability and accessibility of multimedia files. In addition, development of technical solutions and agreed metadata sets lags behind that of other resource types. While much of the preservation knowledge base centres around static digital files, it is essential that the HE /FE community is aware of the issues of preservation for a whole range of file types, especially complex multi-object files types, such as moving pictures files. Over the past few years, the JISC has funded a series of feasibility studies which aim to assess the preservation risk and retention criteria for digital content, and to help inform and prioritise the development of future services and calls in digital preservation. The Moving Images and Sound Archiving Study forms part of the feasibility study programme and has been funded to understand more fully the preservation challenges of digital moving image and sound files, to scope the preservation requirements and to determine archiving methodologies and future research directions. The study was conducted from September 2005 to May 2006 by a team from the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS), the BBC Archives in the person of Richard Wright, and King's College Digital Consultancy Services in the person of Simon Tanner. The study is now complete and a copy of the draft final report is available for public consultation at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=project_movingimagesound Comments and feedback are invited till 31 July 2006, which will be considered and incorporated into the final report. Please send your comments to Sheila Anderson at the AHDS ([log in to unmask]) or Helen Hockx-Yu at JISC ([log in to unmask]). Helen Hockx-Yu Programme Manager JISC Office, Kings College London Strand Bridge House (3rd Floor) 138-142 Strand London WC2R 1HH Tel: 020 7848 1803 Mobile: 07813 024633