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 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 |
| 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 | OpenOffice |
| 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