Format policies

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Migration and emulation

Archivematica maintains the original format of all ingested files to support migration and emulation preservation strategies.

Normalization

Archivematica's primary preservation strategy is to normalize files to preservation and access formats upon ingest. The choice of access formats is based on the ubiquity of viewers for the file format. Archivematica's preservation formats are all open standards. Additionally, the choice of preservation format is based on community best practices, availability of open-source normalization tools, and an analysis of the significant properties for each media type.

Media type preservation plans

Media type	File formats	Preservation format(s)	Access format(s)	Normalization tool	Comments
Audio		LPCM/WAVE	MP3	FFmpeg
Presentation files		Open Document Format; PDF/A	PDF	Xena or OpenOffice Impress	Xena may be preferable, since it appears to produce a more accurate representation of the original.
Raster images		TIFF, JPEG2000 or PNG	PNG	ImageMagick	Note: does not include raw camera files. Since TIFF, JPEG2000 and PNG are all good formats for preservation, we could leave any files in those formats as they are (as long as they are uncompressed or losslessly compressed). However, we could normalize other formats, such as JPEG, GIF and BMP, to one of the preservation formats.
Raw camera files		DNG	TIFF or PNG	DigiKam DNG Converter
Spreadsheets		Open Document Format		OpenOffice Calc
Vector images		SVG
Video		Motion JPEG2000/MXF or MPEG-2/MXF	OGG,FLV	FFmpeg	Motion JPEG2000 is the emerging preferred standard for video files but it is hard to find a tool for Linux that converts to that codec. MPEG-2 is an accepted standard, however, which is in use by a number of institutions.
Word processing files		Open Document Format; PDF/A	PDF or PDF/A	OpenOffice Writer	PDF/A normalization of MS Word files is somewhat problematic because best results are achieved from within the native application - i.e. MS Office running in MS Windows. Archivematica does not support either Windows or MS Office since these are proprietary software packages.

Format	Also known as	File extension(s)	Normalization tool
Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform	Adobe XMP	.xmp
Adobe Illustrator drawing	Adobe AI	.ai
Advanced Stream Redirector file	Microsoft ASX Playlist	.asx
Audio/Video Interleaved Format	AVI	.avi
Batch file	MS-DOS batch file MS-Windows batch file	.bat
Cascading Stylesheet		.css	Xena
Comma Separated Values file		.csv	Xena
Command Source Code		.cmd
Document type definition		.dtd
Encapsulated PostScript		.eps
Extensible Markup Language		.xml	Xena
Extensible Stylesheet Language		.xsl
Graphics Interchange Format	GIF	.gif	Xena
Hypertext Markup Language		.html .htm	Xena
JavaScript file	JavaScript programming files JScript files	.js	Xena
Java archive file		.jar	Xena
Joint Photographic Experts Group	JPEG	.jpg	Xena
Macromedia FLV	Flash Video	.flv
Microsoft Excel Workbook	Microsoft Excel Binary Interchange File Format (BIFF)	.xls	Xena
Microsoft Icon file		.ico
Microsoft Powerpoint Presentation		.ppt	Xena
Microsoft Word for Windows	MS-WORD	.doc	Xena
Moving Picture Experts Group file	MPEG	.mpg
MPEG-1 Audio, Layer 3	MP3	.mp3	Xena
Nikon Electronic Format	Nikon Image Format Nikon Digital SLR Camera Raw Image File	.nef
Perl script		.pl	Xena
Portable Document Format		.pdf	Xena
Portable Network Graphics		.png	Xena
Python script file		.py	Xena
Quicktime (video)	MOV QT	.mov
Real Media Metafile		.ram
Rich Text Format		.rtf	Xena
Scalable Vector Graphics		.svg	Xena
Shockwave Flash file		.swf
SQL code		.sql	Xena
Truevision TARGA file	Truevision Advanced Raster Graphics Adapter Truevision Graphics Adapter	.tga, .tpic
Tagged Image File Format		.tiff, .tif	Xena
Visual Basic Scripting file	C Source Code Microsoft Active Scripting language VBScript	.vbs	Xena
Waveform Audio	Wave Audio File Format	.wav	Xena
Windows Bitmap Image file		.bmp	Xena
Windows Media Audio		.wma
Windows Media Player file		.wmv