Library of Congress Recommended Format Specifications

{Please excuse cross-posting}



The Library of Congress announces the availability of its Recommended
Format Specifications, a document describing the hierarchies of the
physical and technical characteristics of creative formats, both analog and
digital, which will best maximize the chances for preservation and
continued accessibility of creative content.  Creators and publishers have
also begun to employ a wide array of intangible digital formats, as well as
continuing to change and adapt the physical formats in which they work.
The Library needs to be able to identify the formats which are suitable for
large-scale acquisition and preservation for long-term access if it is to
continue to build its collection and ensure that it lasts into the future.



The Library was able to identify six basic categories of creative output,
which represent significant parts of the publishing, information, and media
industries, especially those that are rapidly adopting digital production
and are central to building the Library’s collections:  Textual Works and
Musical Compositions; Still Image Works; Audio Works; Moving Image Works;
Software and Electronic Gaming and Learning; and Datasets/Databases.
Technical teams, made up of experts came from across the institution
bringing specialized knowledge in technical aspects of preservation,
ongoing access needs and developments in the marketplace and in the
publishing world, were established to identify recommended formats for each
of these categories and to establish hierarchies of preference among the
formats within them.



The Library will be revisiting these specifications on an annual basis.
The creation and publication of these recommended format specifications is
not intended to serve as an answer to all the questions raised in
preserving and providing long-term access to creative content.  They do not
provide instructions for receiving this material into repositories,
managing that content or undertaking the many ongoing tasks which will be
necessary to maintain this content so that it may be used well into the
future.



The Recommended Format Specifications are available at
http://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/.  For more information,
please contact Ted Westervelt [[email protected]].





Ardie Bausenbach

ILS Program Office

Library of Congress

101 Independence Ave., SE

Washington, DC 20540

[email protected]