The most appropriate file format for any digital object within New York Public Library’s digital collections depends on the context of its creation and acquisition.

Files acquired digitally (Born-digital)

Born-digital objects acquired by the Library should be retained in their original format.

The only exception is for when the Library acquires the results of digitization projects. The Library may re-encode these files to meet its internal digitization standards and discard the original file.

The Library may re-encode the contents of these files to new formats as needed for access purposes.

Files created by digitization

Files created by the Library’s digitization labs or vendor digitization programs should meet the following characteristics:

Encoding

Whenever possible, preservation and edit files should use a lossless-compression encoding. The exceptions to this are:

• when the source material is already digitally-encoded in a way that lossless-compression would increase the size of the resulting file, such as Mini DV tapes
• when there is no lossless option available

Format

Programs should use a minimal set of formats.

Current Recommendations

• Audio - FLAC/FLAC
• Film - MKV/FFV1/FLAC created from DPX by rawcooked
• Still Image - TIFF/ZIP
• Video
  • Analog - MKV/FLAC
  • DV - MOV/DV
  • DVD - ISO