Format policies
Revision as of 14:04, 9 March 2010 by Evelyn McLellan (talk | contribs)
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 | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Audio | LPCM/WAVE | MP3 | FFmpeg | ||
| Presentation files | Open Document Format; PDF/A | Xena or OpenOffice Impress | |||
| Raster images | TIFF, JPEG2000 or PNG | PNG | ImageMagick | ||
| 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. | |