Sustainability of Digital Formats: Planning for Library of Congress Collections

This offering began with descriptions of still images, sound recordings, textual content, and moving images, a starting point that reflected the Library's experience with the types of digital reproductions of historical content produced for American Memory, and general familiarity with its physical collections of photographs, pictorial prints, sound recordings, books and periodicals, and moving image items. These four basic content categories also serve as building blocks for more complex digital works, e.g., serials, compilations, Web sites, multimedia works, etc. Subsequent additions have included the formats appropriate for archived Web sites (the Library of Congress has an active Web Archiving project), datasets (focusing on sets of data values in an organized structure intended for automated analysis), geospatial information, email and personal information manager applications (including calendaring, instant messages, tasks, appointments and more), design and 3D (including built environment and 2D and 3D computer aided design). Over time, additional descriptions will be added to all categories and new categories will be added as well.

Note that descriptions also exist for Generic Formats.