Acceptable Formats

The Scholarship attempts to support as many file formats as possible. We are committed to two different levels of preserving formats: bit preservation and functional preservation.

Bit preservation ensures that a file remains exactly the same over time - not a single bit is changed although software and hardware may no longer be able to interact with it.

With functional preservation the ScholarShip staff commit to migrating the format of the file so that it will remain usable over time. For example, should the older version of the PDF format be phased out in favor of a newer version, we would convert older files to the newer format and ensure that all information in the original is retained.

The staff of The ScholarShip cannot predict or control the formats that our authors will use, nor do we want to. Faculty should use the tools that are best for their purposes, meaning that they will produce files of whatever formats those tools produce. This does not mean, however, that the ScholarShip staff can commit to functional preservation for all file types. We've defined three preservation statuses for potential file formats: supported, known, or unsupported.

• Supported: We fully support the format and use functional preservation techniques.
• Known: We can recognize the format, and can use bit preservation techniques.
• Unsupported: We cannot recognize a format. To be ingested into the Scholarship it will need to be converted to another file type if possible.

When a file is uploaded to the Scholarship, we assign it one of those three categories based on the file type.

The table below identifies the preservation status of many file types. The table lists the MIME type (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions type identifier); common name; typical file name extensions (the part after the dot, e.g. the extension for "index.html" is "html"); and the current status of the file type.