The Digital Preservation Unit is happy to report a list of updates to the Digital Preservation Framework for this past quarter (April to June 2025). All updates are available through GitHub, and the updated File Format Preservation Action Plans are additionally available as Linked Open Data.
New Formats
Nine new formats were added:
- MacOS XML Property List (NF00876)
- MacOS Binary Property List (NF00877)
- Microsoft Access Report SNaPshot (NF00878)
- Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE) WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE (NF00879)
- Avid Pro Tools Project Sessions versions 7-9.9 (NF00880)
- Avid Pro Tools Project Sessions versions 10 and above (NF00881)
- 3G2 (NF00882)
- Unicode Text (UTF-8) (NF00883)
- Unicode Text (UTF-16) (NF00884)
Together, this brings our total to 759 file formats, as one format was deprecated this quarter: American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), Extended, Variable-width encoding Unicode (Universal Coded Character Set) Transformation Format (UTF) (NF00429).
Updated Record Category Preservation Action Plans
Two Record Category Preservation Action Plans had minor updates this quarter:
- The Digital Still Image plan was updated to reflect the addition of National Imagery Transmission Format 2.0 (NF00694) and National Imagery Transmission Format 2.1 (NF00695) to the NARA Transfer Guidance. These two versions of NITF are now acceptable formats for the transfer of born-digital photographs, but per the Transfer Guidance, should not be used for digitized photographs.
- The Email plan was updated to reflect the recategorization of Outlook Personal Folders (PST_ANSI) (NF00282) in the NARA Transfer Guidance from an acceptable format to an acceptable format for imminent transfer of email.
Updated File Format Description and Justification Statements
Last quarter, we shared news about a project to review and update the Description and Justification statements in the File Format Preservation Action Plans. Work continues, and this quarter we’ve published 163 updated descriptions! We’ve gotten help from the Electronic Records Archives (ERA) Program Management staff in our office on this project, and we hope these updated descriptions provide useful insight into why NARA takes the preservation actions we do.
Updated Risk Levels
One format had its risk level change: Rich Text Format 1.7 (NF00612) changed from Moderate to Low.
Other Updates
A number of format names were updated, primarily as a result of the work to update the Description and Justification statements. The change log in GitHub lists these and other updates.