Format policies
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- Note that "media type preservation plans" are known as "format policies" as of 0.9-beta release, Summer 2012
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. 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. The choice of access formats is based on the ubiquity of viewers for the file format.
Follow the link for each file format for further information about the open-source normalization tools and settings that have been tested and integrated into Archivematica to make the format conversions.
Format policies
| Media type | File formats | Preservation format(s) | Access format(s) | Normalization tool |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Audio | AC3, AIFF, MP3, WAV, WMA | WAVE (LPCM) | MP3 | FFmpeg |
| PST | MBOX | MBOX | readpst | |
| Maildir** | Original format | MBOX | md2mb.py | |
| Office Open XML | DOCX, PPTX, XLSX | Original format | PDF for PPTX | OpenOffice |
| Plain text | TXT | Original format | Original format | None |
| Portable Document Format | PDF/A | Original format | Ghostscript | |
| Presentation files | PPT | Original format | 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 | Original format | Original format | None |
| Vector images | AI, EPS, SVG | SVG | Inkscape | |
| Video | AVI, FLV, MOV, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, SWF, WMV | FFV1/LPCM in MKV | MPEG-1 | FFmpeg |
| Word processing files | DOC, WPD, RTF |
|
OpenOffice |
- (*) PNG and JPEG2000 are not normalized to a preservation format
- (**) in development
While there is not currently a default format policy for Websites, we have done some research and assessment work with our clients that may be of interest towards developing one.