Sustainability of Digital Formats
 Planning for Library of Congress Collections

This initial offering is limited to still images, sound recordings, textual content, and moving images. This starting point reflects the Library's experience with the types of digital reproductions of historical content produced for American Memory, and general familiarity with its physical collections of photographs, pictorial prints, sound recordings, books and periodicals,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. The compilers started their analysis with simpler, more familiar forms of expression and plan to move to the more complex, using the needs of particular projects at the Library of Congress to guide the order of consideration. Since the Library of Congress has an active Web Capture project, archiving Web sites, primarily in thematic collections, the formats appropriate for archived Web sites are of particular interest. Over time, additional categories may be added to this section of the Digital Formats Web site. Note that descriptions also exist for generic formats.