/
Formats

Formats

Introduction

Formats are the MediaHaven implementation of the PRONOM registry developed by the National Archives. Each format represents a particular file format. Examples are the very common JPEG File Interchange Format with pronom ID “fmt/44” or the Acrobat PDF/A - Portable Document Format 1a with pronom ID “fmt/95”. During the Ingest Flows the metadata is harvested, including the pronom ID stored in the Metadata 24.3 as Technical.PronomId.

Business Logic

  • When a format is not allowed, objects having this format will be rejected during the ingest

  • Formats can be linked with one or more transformations. For each of the Transformations linked with the format, an access representation will be generated

  • See Ingest 2.0 Configuration Overview for additional information

Properties

Property

Description

Example

Property

Description

Example

PronomId

Unique identifier determined by the National Archives.

fmt/22

Name

Human readable name of the format

JPEG File Interchange Format

Version

When a class of formats have different versions (e.g. PDF 1/A, B, etc).

3

Allowed

When a format is not allowed objects having this format will be rejected during ingest.

True

ForPreservation

Whether this format is stable for long-term preservation. When this property is active any original representation under the Data Objects will be marked with the metadata field Administrative.IsPreservation set to true.

True

ForAccess

Whether this format can be used in Transformations.

True

Extensions

The typical extensions used in filenames to indicate that a file has this format.

[“jpg”, “jpeg”]

Events

This feature has been introduced in version 25.4

Events now include the type FILE_FORMAT_CHECK with the comment stating by which software the pronom ID has been determined. Currently, MediaHaven uses both

  • Siegfried

  • Fido

Examples

Pronom ID fmt/44 determined by Siegfried v1.11.2 using signature file (DROID_SignatureFile_V120.xml; container-signature-20240715.xml) is allowed

Pronom ID fmt/200 determined by Fido v1.6.1 using signature file (formats-v109.xml, container-signature-20200121.xml) is allowed