Formats

Library of Congress Recommended Format Specifications
Comments and feedback requested by March 31, 2015
Recommended Format Specifications are hierarchies of the physical and technical characteristics of creative formats, both analog and digital, which will best meet the needs of all concerned, maximizing the chances for survival and continued accessibility of creative content well into the future.
Recommended Format Specifications (HTML)
Recommended Format Specifications [PDF: 660 KB, 17 pp.]
Flyer [JPG: 1.15 MB]

Nine months ago, the Library of Congress released its Recommended Format Specifications. This was the result of years of work by experts from across the institution, bringing their own specialized knowledge in the needs and expectations of our patrons, developments in publishing and production and the technical aspects of creation, presentation and distribution. The Library of Congress invested so much effort in this because it is essential to the mission of the institution.

“The internet is forever.” So goes a saying regarding the impossibility of removing material – such as stolen photographs – permanently from the web. Yet paradoxically the vast and growing digital sphere faces enormous losses. Google has been criticised for failing to ensure access to its archive of Usenet newsgroup postings that stretch back to the early 1980s. And now internet pioneer Vint Cerf has warned of a “digital dark age” that would result if decades of data – emails, photographs, website postings – becoming lost or un-readable.

n the last post we looked at Why a digital preservation strategy is necessary. This post outlines a few of the steps we are taking here at the Digitization Centre to enact our preservation goals.

Planning for preservation starts at the creation of our digital objects. We need to choose digital formats that are suitable for the long-term and follow best-practices for their creation. There are many factors that go into the choice of formats, for example check out the detailed information from the Library of Congress.

We are pleased to announce the publication of nine new format descriptions on the Library’s Format Sustainability Web site. This is a closely related set, each of which pertains to a member of the Office Open XML (OOXML) family.

The Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) has started the process of taking over stewardship of JHOVE, the widely-used open source digital preservation tool.

FADGI’s report on selected born digital video projects in a range of federal agencies includes the use of various Apple ProRes 422 codecs.

In recent years the Portable Document Format (PDF) has become a ubiquitous format in the exchange of documents; in 2005 the PDF/A profile was defined in order to meet long term accessibility needs, and has accordingly come to be regarded as a long-term archiving strategy for PDF files. In the field of archaeology, a growing number of PDF files – containing the detailed results of fieldwork and research – are beginning to be deposited with digital archives such as the Archaeology Data Service (ADS).

s detailed in the Conclusion (below), this post describes my exploration of a number of different tools and techniques for repairing damaged or corrupt PDF files. For the particular set of PDFs I was working on, the most effective technique would have started with an examination of file names and contents in Notepad (see Manual Repair section). The several canned programs I tried were also able to restore a few corrupt files. In addition, with the investment of sufficient time and effort, certain command-line tools might also have been helpful.

The born digital video exploration is being led by the Library of Congress. The documents that comprise Creating and Archiving Born Digital Video provide practical technical information for both file creators and file archivists to help them make informed decisions when creating or archiving born digital video files and to understand the long term consequences of those decisions. The information is intended to serve memory institutions, especially in the U.S. federal sector.