Formats

The Library of Congress has a fundamental commitment to acquiring, preserving and making accessible in the long term the creative output of the nation and the world. The Library has devised the Recommended Format Specifications to enable it to identify what formats will most easily lend themselves to preservation and long-term access, especially with regard to digital formats.

Weirder than old: The CP/M File System and Legacy Disk Extracts for New Zealand’s Department of Conservation
from Ross Spencer's Blog:

SMPTE published a standard that codifies the Archive eXchange Format (AXF). An IT-centric file container that can encapsulate any number and type of files in a fully self-contained and self-describing package, AXF supports interoperability among disparate content storage systems and ensures content's long-term availability, no matter how storage or file system technology evolves.
http://www.openaxf.org/news-and-resources/2014/9/11/smpte-publishes-arch...

WHAT DOES FLINT DO?
Flint is a framework to facilitate a configurable file/format validation. Its underlying architecture is based on the idea that file/format validation almost always has a specific use-case with concrete requirements that may differ from a validation against the official industry standard of a given format. The following are the principle ideas we’ve implemented in order to match such requirements.
Who is the intended audience?
Flint is for:

Flint – Validate PDF/EPUB Files against Institutional Policies

The 2014 National Agenda for Digital Stewardship makes a clear-cut case for the development of File Format Action Plans to combat format obsolescence issues.

If you’ve ever been to a warehouse store on a weekend afternoon, you’ve experienced the power of the sample. In the retail world, samples are an important tool to influence potential new customers who don’t want to invest in an unknown entity. I certainly didn’t start the day with lobster dip on my shopping list but it was in my cart after I picked up and enjoyed a bite-sized taste.

AV Insider issue 4 (December 2013) is themed "Film, Files, Formats, and the Future". This issue covers technical guidelines and examples of good practice from both Memoriav (Switzerland) and the Institute for Sound and Vision (Netherlands). They have both looked at many options and have shared their findings. Lene Halvor Petersen of the Danish Film Institute tells about the differences between film and broadcast archives. And there are deep dives into file format specifications for film heritage, open source digitisation, and best practices for dealing with compressed video.

This paper presents an approach for automatic estimation of preservation risk for file formats. The main contribution of this work is a definition of the risk factors with associated severity level and its automatic computation. Our goal is to apply a solid knowledge base automatically extracted from linked open data repositories as the basis of the risk analysis system for digital preservation. This method is meant to facilitate decision making with regard to preservation of digital content in libraries and archives.

AV Insider is a quarterly magazine for the audiovisual digital preservation community.