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 characteristics for each media type.

Media type preservation plans

Media type	File formats	Preservation format(s)	Access format(s)	Normalization tool
Audio	AC3, AIFF, MP3, WAV, WMA	WAVE (LPCM)	MP3	FFmpeg
Email	PST	MBOX	MBOX	readpst
Office Open XML	DOCX, PPTX, XLSX	Original format	PDF for PPTX	OpenOffice
Plain text	TXT	Original format	Original format	None
Portable Document Format	PDF	PDF/A	PDF	Ghostscript
Presentation files	PPT	ODF	PDF	OpenOffice
Raster images	BMP, GIF, JPG, JP2*, PCT, PNG*, PSD, TIFF, TGA	Uncompressed TIFF	JPEG	ImageMagick
Raw camera files/Digital Negative format**	3FR, ARW, CR2, CRW, DCR, DNG, ERF, KDC, MRW, NEF, ORF, PEF, RAF, RAW, X3F	Original format	JPEG	ImageMagick/UFRaw
Spreadsheets	XLS	ODF	Original format	OpenOffice
Vector images	AI, EPS, SVG	SVG	PDF	Inkscape
Video	AVI, FLV, MOV, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, SWF, WMV	MPEG-2	MPG	FFmpeg
Word processing files	DOC, WPD, RTF	ODF	PDF	OpenOffice

• (*) PNG and JPEG2000 are not normalized to a preservation format
• (**) in development