Effort started on federal guidelines for digitizing audio and video content

Carl Fleischhauer of the U.S. Library of Congress is leading an effort to develop federal guidelines to digitize audio and video related materials. The goal is to create a common specification for use by different federal agencies. One of the main issues is related to metadata since "not everybody agrees about where to draw the line on how much metadata to embed". The metadata can also be used can help restore context that is lost during digitizing. More information is available from a Federal Computer Week article.