Future of Memory

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.

• Acknowledgments List of Acronyms Introduction. So Many Standards, So Little Time: The People and Politics Behind Archival Video Formats “Lossless”: The Materiality of Archival Video Format Standards Standards with a Capital S: The Making and Meaning of JPEG 2000 and MXF Wild Formats: The History and Standardization of FFV1 and Matroska Standards at Work: For-Profit, Nonprofit, and the Global and Social Technopolitics of Standardization Notes Works Cited Index

“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