Regulations and recommendations about file formats

Swedish National Archives has sent out a remittance concerning a draft of regulations about file formats for agencies in the public sector, https://riksarkivet.se/rafs/remiss/. The draft Is accompanied by extensive technical and legal comments and consist totally of 1600 pages. It is written by Benjamin Yousefi who spent about 8 years with different aspect of the developing work. It thoroughly goes through the technical aspects of file formats and fit these into the Swedish legal framework. It develops a model to evaluate and choose suitable file format. Referees implementations is advised as method to handle the problem that many format specifications not are precise enough which could lead to different “dialects” of formats, something which may cause problems when it comes to long time digital preservation. The regulations aim to cover all relevant digital formats and consist of extensive table were a high number of file formats describe and evaluated. There are two draft regulation. The first one concerns the creation of technical documents which may be public document within whole the public sector. The second one concerns the governmental sector and set up demands concerning digital public documents. The regulations also expect the agencies to concern in choosing suitable formats for their situation. As an introduction Magnus Geber will talk a little about demands and recommendations about file formats generally in the ordinary archival sector. He will also mention another activity. Independently and parallel to the work in Sweden the international organisation OPF (Open Preservation Foundation) https://openpreservation.org/ has a working group doing an ‘International Comparison of Recommended File Formats’, https://openpreservation.org/resources/member-groups/international-comparison-of-recommended-file-formats/ . It’s intended to enable comparisons between institutional practices in the digital preservation community and may serve as a tool for developing best practices with those of similar institutions in mind