Manchester-based BBC productions are turning away from the broadcaster’s in-house edit suites after the facility’s central server suffered a “major crash” last month.

Up to 30 edit seats used by the broadcaster’s Children’s and Vision departments have been affected by the storage problems. The BBC said the initial problem had been fixed, but that further upgrades by the broadcaster and its technology suppliers along with the installation of Fabric tools could take several weeks.

Source: Broadcast

The BBC is considering broadcasting the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee pop concert in 3D.

The broadcaster yesterday revealed plans to stage what it described as the biggest concert in its history as part of the four-day celebration of the Queen’s 60-year reign.

Executive editor of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee for the BBC Ben Weston told Broadcast that showing the concert in 3D would present “a new layer of technical challenges”.

Source: Broadcast

Starting with a colorful anecdote about a cache of early silent films discovered beneath a Canadian hockey rink, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson look at the evolution of film preservation, and how the modern transition to digital formats could harm our ability to take care of the industry’s works long-term. Two of the main issues are storage and compatibility; properly-stored film prints have a certain physical resilience to them, while digital tapes and hard drives are relatively fragile by comparison. Rapidly evolving file formats and DRM also carry the risk of leaving one decade’s digital archive unreadable by the next, potentially putting future film historians in the same position as someone trying to rescue a school paper written in a long-abandoned word processor

Source: The Verge

“Partnerships in curating European digital resources”

The LIBER Steering Committee for Heritage Collections and Preservation, in collaboration with the Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale in Florence and the National Library of the Netherlands, invites you to attend the second international workshop on digital preservation.

‘Do not go at this game alone’, was the unmistakable advice given to LIBER libraries at the end of the first LIBER workshop on digital preservation in The Hague in 2010. Since then, the euro crisis and budget cuts have only exacerbated the need to seek partnerships in securing long-term access to your digital collections. But with whom can you partner? How does it work? What are the advantages and disadvantages of various forms of partnering? And how much of the responsibility will always be yours, no matter how much of the actual work you outsource to others?

Source: Digitization 101 Blog

Curators at The British Library have begun the process of archiving videogame websites to preserve gaming culture for future generations.

While game experts have previously tended to concentrate on archiving physical items such as computers, disks and cassettes, the Library feels gaming websites perfectly illustrate the impact of the industry on society.

The collection is being managed by the digital curation and preservation staff at the Library and it will include walkthroughs, FAQs, maps drawn by gamers, reviews, pictures and stories which develop game narratives.

Source: The Independent

Articles include:

Forthcoming events from February 2012 onwards

New reports and initiatives since the last issue

Institutional Research Data Management services: a growing trend – Sarah Jones, DCC

One World – Digital Preservation in France – Louise Fauduet, Bibliothèque nationale de France

Source: Digital Preservation Coalition

The idea is simple: Make a high-resolution digital image of a sound recording and develop software to analyze the image and reproduce the effects of a phonograph needle.

Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Library of Congress have brought the concept to a practical application over the past 10 years, developing a system to digitally recover and preserve rare and damaged recordings without the risk of doing additional damage.

The result is the Image, Reconstruct, Erase Noise, Etc., or IRENE, now being used by the Library of Congress. A version capable of two-dimensional imaging is used for disc recordings with lateral grooves, and three-dimensional imaging is used for cylinders with vertical groove modulation. The 2-D version also works for imaging and playing back optically recorded audio files, such as those on early experimental recordings and on some motion picture soundtracks.

Source: GCN  See Also:  A race to restore the voices of the past (GCN)

• · What is Digital Preservation?

Digital Preservation is the process of ensuring that digital information remains accessible to us in the long term.

For Parliament, this means making sure that our digital resources remain authentic and accessible in the future for anyone who needs them. To do this we must counter the threats of rapid technological obsolescence and the inherent fragility of digital media, by finding ways of identifying and predicting the impacts of those threats on our data, and by planning and carrying out appropriate preservation strategies to mitigate these impacts.

Now that this year’s Academy Awards nominations have been announced, ‘tis the “season” for revisiting some of the best movies of the past year.  But in addition to the creating and enjoying of the films themselves, there is another issue which those in the film industry, along with the Library’s digital preservation partners, are researching and working on behind the scenes – preservation of these digital films.

Source: The Signal

The following is a guest post by Nicholas Taylor, Information Technology Specialist for the Repository Development Group at the Library of Congress.

As much as we can do to preserve archived websites once we have them, the challenges we encounter are always already determined by how those websites were originally constructed. In the interest of giving us and others the best possible chance of preserving your online content, I wanted to follow on an excellent blog post by Robin Davis (previously) of the Smithsonian Institution Archives on the topic of designing preservable websites. Here are some best practices to keep in mind:

Source: The Signal