The Electronic Records Archives Division of the Office of the Chief Operating Officer is happy to report on updates to the Digital Preservation Framework for April – October 2026. The Framework is available through GitHub, and the updated File Format Preservation Action Plans are also available as Linked Open Data.
Although it’s been a bit longer than usual since an update, this is a big one! Twenty-four new formats have been added to the Framework. Some additions are more recent versions of existing format families in the Framework, including OpenDocument, Digital Negative, and Canon RAW. Others are formats that NARA has started receiving in larger quantities recently, including General Purpose RAW (GPR), Sassy Cascading Style Sheets, and formats from the Adobe Captivate software, an e-learning software tool.
Screenshot of Adobe Captivate Classic software, which produced .CPTX project files, a format newly added to the Digital Preservation Framework. Screenshot via Adobe.
Research for eleven entries was conducted by Krystyna Coulby and Kathryn Herberger, archivists in the Trump Presidential Library, while working on a project with the Electronic Records Archives Division:
- Canon RAW 3 (CR3) (NF00903)
- Sassy Cascading Style Sheets (NF00904)
- Maya ASCII Scene File Format (.ma) (NF00905)
- Maya Binary Scene File Format (.mb) (NF00906)
- Maya Embedded Language Scripting File (NF00907)
- Adobe Captivate Cached Project (NF00908)
- Glyph Interchange Format (NF00909)
- STereoLithography ASCII (NF00910)
- STereoLithography Binary (NF00911)
- Adobe Captivate Project (.cp) (NF00912)
- Adobe Captivate Classic Project (.cptx) (NF00913)
Research for General Purpose RAW (GPR) (NF00893) was completed by Emily Sutherland, Archivist in the Transparency and Access Program of Research Services.
We continued work on our project to review and update the Description and Justification statements in the Preservation Action Plans to make this information more standardized. We updated over 200 descriptions since the last Framework update, and are nearing the completion of this work.
Our colleagues at the National Archives UK recently released a new website for the PRONOM file format registry, a resource which NARA staff regularly consult in our work. We’ve updated the links to PRONOM in the Preservation Action Plans to match the new PRONOM URL format.
The change log in GitHub lists all updates for the quarter.