Establishing a Global Digital Format Registry

Detailed knowledge of the internal properties of digital representation formats is necessary to interpret properly the full information content of otherwise opaque digital objects. These properties form an important component of the representation information needed by repository workfl ows regardless of local preservation strategy and infrastructure decisions. The Digital Library Federation (DLF) has sponsored preliminary investigations toward establishing a Global Digital Format Registry (GDFR) that will function as a sustainable utility for maintaining the bindings between public identifi ers for digital formats and the signifi cant syntactic and semantic properties of those formats. A sustainable GDFR should prove to be of great utility to archives, libraries, digital repositories, and other organizations and individuals interested in the long-term viability of digital assets. (From the article)published or submitted for publicatio