I'm posting the same thing to digi-pres, so apologies to those on both who get two of the same question.
We are in the serious part of planning a media archive (oral histories) that will include interviews, some in audio, some in video formats. 1. I originally assumed that we would store the audio in aiff or wav, per the IASA "Guidelines on the Production and Preservation of Digtial Audio Objects" book, with mp3 used for "presentation" copies. Now I here that mp3 is being used by many archives as their preservation format. A lossy preservation format? This makes no sense to me, but if the world has changed, I'm ready to listen. What do you use? If it is mp3, why? 2. For video, I have no clear idea what the preservation format should be--dvi, I have been assuming, since in our case, these are all coming off DV tape? (Don't talk to me about disk space requirements!) We use mpg for presentation copies. Again, are others doing differently? What works for you? Why? 3. I am leaning heavily towards storing the objects and metadata in FEDORA (possibly using Fez until something simpler becomes available--we are stumbling reasonably forward in a first configuration attempt). Given one basic, albeit complex, content model, are there people with similar experience who are happy with a different toolset? Other than the general desire to keep costs down, the requirement that the repository be accessible over the web, and to be able to migrate when/if we decide on a different repository I feel quite agnostic. If you are using a tool that really works for you doing similar work, what is it? What makes it work so well for you? Thanks for any and all discussion and feedback, ari
