Recommended File Formats
The following file formats are recommended for maintaining and preserving digital content. They were taken from the Smithsonian’s “Recommended Preservation Formats for Electronic Records.”
Type | Primary Preservation Format (preferred) | Secondary Preservation Format (acceptable) |
Text/word processing applications | PDF/A, PDF | RTF (text), TXT, XML with schema |
Spreadsheet applications or structured data | PDF/A (must capture entire workbook – macros disabled) | CSV Tab-delimited TXT, XML |
Presentations | PDF/A, PDF | Original |
Images | TIFF (uncompressed) | JPG, DNG, PNG, JP2 |
Graphics | TIFF | |
Video | Motion JPEG 2000, MOV, AVI | MPEG-4 |
Audio | BWF-Broadcast WAV (.wav is the extension) | WAV, AIFF, FLAC |
Database Management Systems (DBMS) | Keep original | XML with schema |
CAD | PDF/A, PDF/E or PDF with original file | Original |
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