SUNScholar/Digitisation/Digital Formats

Digital Format Registry

• http://www.udfr.org
• http://www.gdfr.info

Types of digital formats and codecs

• For documents refer to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_OpenDocument_software and http://www.pdfa.org.
• For audio refer to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_audio_codecs and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Lossless_Audio_Codec
• For video refer to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_codecs and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_(codec)
• For images refer to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_file_formats and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_image

Electronic Metadata Schemas

• http://wiki.lib.sun.ac.za/index.php/SUNScholar/Metadata
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OASIS_(organization)
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronom
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encoded_Archival_Description

Digital Formats Extra Information

Click on the heading above.

Common Closed Digital Formats (To be avoided at all costs)

Please check the following websites for more information about using open digital format standards and the movement to support this:

• http://defendinnovation.org
• http://patentabsurdity.com
• http://en.swpat.org

Documents

All the Microsoft document formats are closed.

This is a huge problem for digital preservation.

• http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/intro/intro.shtml
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Office_Open_XML_and_OpenDocument

Multimedia

All the Microsoft media formats are closed.

This is a huge problem for digital preservation.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_Audio
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_Video

Other closed media formats

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Open_formats_closed_by_software_patents
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3 (Lossy audio codec, many patent trolls)
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding (Lossy audio codec, many patent trolls)
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpeg4 (Lossy video codec, many patent trolls)
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jpeg (Lossy image codec, many patent trolls)
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagged_Image_File_Format (Lossless image codec, many patent trolls)
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Video (Closed format multimedia container, many patent trolls)

Back to Digital Objects