Agreements

The Dobes Programme agreed on a number of topics, particularly the following conclusions, which were reached after intensive discussions between all partners during the first year of the project. These have been extended upon over the following years.

1. Ethical and Legal Aspects

The partners agreed on a number of documents that have developed over time. For a detailed look click here.

2. Technical Agreements

In the area of archiving, digitization and input to the archive, the partners agreed on a number of points:

• the documentation teams should ensure they capture the highest achievable quality, and where possible not use compressed formats;
• the archive should store resources in open, well-documented and widely used formats such as
• UNICODE for character encoding
• XML for the structural representation of texts
• audio recordings should be included at least as 16 bit linear PCM files with 48 kHz sample frequency (it is strongly recommended therefore to not make recordings in MiniDisk or MP3 format)
• video recordings should be stored as MPEG2 files (MPEG2 is a compressed format so everyone knows that we will step over to better representations when they are technologically feasable)
• images should be stored preferentially as uncompressed TIFF files, however, JPEG and PNG are also allowed
• for unstructured texts also HTML and Plain ASCII are possible
• with respect to input formats it was agreed that at least the SHOEBOX and CHAT formats are supported for textual data; other formats such as WORD, EXCEL, Transcriber, etc. can be deposited, but no commitments can be given whether the data will be converted into accepted archival formats - the costs may be simply too high
• with respect to presentation formats at the Web, formats such as MPEG4 and MP3 may be supported