Format policies

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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
Email PST MBOX MBOX readpst
Email 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 PDF/A Original format Ghostscript
Presentation files PPT Original format 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 Original format Original format OpenOffice
Vector images AI, EPS, SVG SVG PDF 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
  • ODF (WPD and RTF)
  • Original format (DOC)
PDF OpenOffice
  • (*) PNG and JPEG2000 are not normalized to a preservation format
  • (**) in development