The Future of Memory: A History of Lossless Format Standards in the Moving Image Archive

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Jimi Jones Marek Jancovic

The Future of Memory

A History of Lossless Format Standards in the Moving Image Archive

Jimi Jones, Marek Jancovic

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Paperback

Forthcoming
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English

University of Illinois Press
08 July 2025

Films, movies & cinema; Reference works; Library, archive & information management; Automation of library & information processes; Media studies

Series: The History of Media and Communication

A new generation of video standards promises lossless storage of digital objects for future generations. Jimi Jones and Marek Jancovic document the development and adoption of JPEG 2000, FFV1, MXF, and Matroska while investigating the social and material aspects of their design and the forces driving their journeys from niche to ubiquity.

Drawing on interviews with archivists and developers, Jones and Jancovic reveal the archive as a dynamic space where deeply entrenched social practices produce disagreements but also resourceful collaborations. They contrast the unprecedented rise of archivist-driven standardization and controversies around non-standard technology with the historical dominance of the film and broadcast industries. Throughout, the authors clarify the role of tech companies, software developers, film pirates, hackers, and other players with poorly understood roles in the process.

A timely look at the state of audiovisual preservation, The Future of Memory provides a history of recent innovations alongside a snapshot of a field in the midst of profound technological change.

By: Jimi Jones, Marek Jancovic
Imprint: University of Illinois Press
Country of Publication: United States
Edition: New edition
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 18mm
Weight: 340g
ISBN: 9780252088759
ISBN 10: 0252088751
Series: The History of Media and Communication
Pages: 216
Publication Date: 08 July 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Jimi Jones is an adjunct lecturer of library and information sciences for the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Marek Jancovic is an assistant professor of media studies at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is the author of A Media Epigraphy of Video Compression: Reading Traces of Decay.

Reviews for The Future of Memory: A History of Lossless Format Standards in the Moving Image Archive

""The first history of film was written in 1894, when cinema had not been born yet. A quarter of the twenty-first century has elapsed, and no global history of digital media is still in sight. It would be a daunting task, worthy of a Jorge Luis Borges story, but Jones and Jancovic have succeeded in writing a key chapter of it. Don't be deterred by its acronyms: you don't have to be a computer geek to enjoy getting lost in the labyrinth of media archives' quixotic struggle against impermanence.""--Paolo Cherchi Usai, George Eastman Museum