Connecting You to Standards and Best Practices: Library of Congress Updates

LIPA is committed to connecting you to standards and best practices. Working towards the sustainability of electronic collections is an important goal that depends in part on shared standards. The Library of Congress recently made strides in this direction with the release of its 2017-2018 Recommended Formats Statement (http://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/).

In the Statement, the Library of Congress:

identifies hierarchies of the physical and technical characteristics of creative formats, both analog and digital, which will best meet the needs of all concerned, maximizing the chances for survival and continued accessibility of creative content well into the future.

The changes in this current iteration of the Recommended Formats focus on metadata and integration with other crucial preservation documentation. The Library of Congress hopes to highlight the importance of detailed metadata, and the Statement provides  examples for textual works, still images, and datasets and databases, at http://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/RFS%202017-2018.pdf. To help with integration, the Library of Congress has improved cross-linking between relevant documentation, including linking the Statement with the file format descriptions in the Library’s Sustainability  of Digital Formats (https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/) and with the Library’s Guide to Creating Preservable Websites (http://loc.gov/webarchiving/preservable.html).

If you are working on preservation and access, these documents provide important guidance.