File formats

[Englishuser]

Hi,

What file formats do you use for storing text files, sound files and images? As far as text files are concerned, do you prefer RTF, DOC, XML, PDF, TXT or some other file format? As for sound files, do you go for MP3 or WAV? And what do you think of TIFF images as opposed to JPG images? Many file formats are likely to become obsolete relatively soon. What file formats would you choose for archival purposes?

EU

[Torsten]

Hi Englishuser,

The vast majority of my files are either Word or PDF documents many of which I upload to our web server so I can access them when I travel. Some of my invoices are Excel documents and I have also a a few plain text files. As far as audio files are concerned, I prefer MP3. Finally, most of my photographs are saved as jpg files. You are right, quite a number of file formats are becoming absolute and I can imagine that in the near future there will only a be a few standardized file formats since more and more content becomes available on the web where universal standards are vital.

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[Englishuser]

Hi Torsten,

Thank you for your reply. As you pointed out, having a few standard file formats in use would probably be practical.

I mostly analyse file formats from an archivist's point of view, which means I need to consider things most computer users rarely think of. For instance, documents written in Microsoft Word format are easy to access and most likely remain accessible as long as they are current or semi-current. But the lifespan of a document sometimes continues beyond that entering a historical phase.

For archival purposes, we therefore need to convert Word documents into more reliable file formats such as XML or TIFF. Plain text files are also good, but when you convert files into plain text format you lose important information about the layout of the original document. Do you keep any documents in XML or TIFF format? Why or why not?

EU