Digital File Formats

Introduction

This page provides a general overview of the file types produced by the activities of the Digital Libraries Division, or accepted for inclusion in the UNT Libraries’ Digital Collections.

Preferred File Formats

These are commonly-accepted file formats for which we intend to maintain bitstream preservation in addition to preserving the functionality and content of the files.

  Mimetype Common/Accepted Extensions
Tagged Image File Format image/tiff .tif, .tiff
Joint Photographic Experts Group image/jpeg .jpg, .jpeg
Portable Document Format application/pdf .pdf
Text file text/plain .txt
Hypertext Markup Language file text/html .htm, .html
Audio Video Interleave file application/x-troff-msvideo
video/avi
video/msvideo
video/avs-video
.avi
Quicktime video/quicktime .mov
Matroska video/x-matroska .mkv
Waveform Audio file audio/wav
audio/x-wav
.wav, .wave
Audio Interchange File Format audio/aiff
audio/x-aiff
.aif, .aiff
ARC application/octet-stream .arc, .arc.gz
Web ARChive file application/warc .warc, .warc.gz
Portable Network Graphics file image/png .png

Recognized File Formats

These file formats are less preferred. Although we still preserve content and files at the bit level, functionality may be lost over time.

  Mimetype Common/Accepted Extensions
Motion Picture Entertainment Group video/mpeg
audio/mpeg
.mpg, .mpeg
Flash Video Format video/x-flv .flv
MPEG Group4 video/mp4 .mp4, .m4v
Windows Media video/x-ms-wmv .wmv
MPEG Group4 audio/mpeg3
audio/x-mpeg-3
video/mpeg
video/x-mpeg
.mp3

Standard Normalization Paths

For some born-digital file types, we create a set of derivatives to display the contents in a more standardized way. Although we retain all file types and derivatives, they may not all be visible or accessible from the public interface.

Original File Intermediary File(s) Display/Public Files
Word document (.doc, .docx) .pdf .jpg
Portable Document Format (.pdf) >> .jpg
Powerpoint (.ppt, .pptx) .pdf .jpg
Spreadsheet (.xls, .xlsx) >> .csv
OpenDocument file:    

presentation
text document

.pdf, .ppt
.pdf, .doc
.jpg