Research Archive Supported Formats

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Format Support Policy

Format Support Levels

What To Do If Your Format Isn't Listed

While we can accept and store any file format, long term preservation requires that the format is well known. Applications come and go, and files created with an applcation may become unusable if that application becomes obsolete.

We have defined three levels of support for file formats, as indicated in the table below:

1. Supported. There is a high likelihood that its content, appearance, and functions will be preserved over time. Supported file formats are well documented within the software community and can be rendered by a variety of software applications.
2. Known. We recognise this format, but cannot guarantee its support over time. In general, this applies to proprietary formats whose underlying code is not available to the wider software community. Preservation of content, appearance, and function will be dependent on the application vendor maintaining backward compatibility in future releases of the application used to create the file.
3. Unknown. We have no knowledge of, or information about this format. The bitstream will be preserved, but not appearance or functionality.

Note on the use of ZIP files:
Sometimes it is essential - or merely convenient - to compress a large file, bundle multiple files together for ease of downloading, or to preserve an important directory/folder structure. A multi-page website is an example of the latter situation. LU Research Archive recognizes ZIP as a standard way of doing this.
It is important to note, however, that a ZIP file is only as good as its contents. ZIP is simply a wrapper around the files people will actually use, so creating quality PDFs, webpages, images, etc. remains essential. The support levels above will still apply to the files within a ZIP archive.

Please contact your Research Archive Administrator if you have questions about a particular format.