Format policies

Main Page > Documentation > Media type preservation plans

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
Application files	BAT, JS, JAR, PL, .PY, SQL, VBS
Audio	AC3, MP3, WAV, WMA	LPCM/WAVE	MP3	FFmpeg
Portable Document Format	PDF	PDF/A	PDF/A
Presentation files	PPT	ODF	PDF	Xena or OpenOffice Impress
Raster images	BMP, GIF, ICO, JPG, JP2, PNG, TIFF, TGA	Uncompressed TIFF	PNG	ImageMagick
Raw camera files	NEF	DNG	PNG	DigiKam DNG Converter
Spreadsheets	XLS	ODF	Original format	Xena or OpenOffice Calc
Text	AXF, CSS, CSV, HTML, RTF, TXT, XML, XSL
Vector images	AI, SVG	SVG
Video	AVI, FLV, MOV, MPEG, SWF, WMV	MPEG-2/MXF	OGV	FFmpeg
Word processing files	DOC, EPS, WPD	ODF/PDFA	PDF	Xena or OpenOffice Writer