5. Media and Formats

See Exemplars and Further Reading

Section 2.9.2 Technical Standards, provides a summary of preferred formats recommended by AHDS service providers. Further details are available in individual Guides to Good Practice.

Chapter 5, Short- and long-term preservation of electronic information, offers advice on data storage media (including advice on storage conditions) and file formats.The latter general advice is "Best practice is to decide on a common set of standards from the outset to make it easier to circulate information.

Preferably the same formats should be used for both short-term and long-term preservation". Both storage media and file formats are grouped into families, with examples of the major types in each.

One of five guides commissioned by DLF and CLIR and published with RLG.This guide provides steps in how to select file formats for digital masters, selecting those based on a combination of performance and durability.

Includes general advice on selecting file formats for images.