Langzeitformat

Langzeitformat is a concept in digital preservation that refers to formats intended to ensure long-term readability and interpretability of digital objects, despite changes in software, hardware, or organizational contexts. It denotes formats designed for longevity rather than casual interchange, emphasizing openness, well-documented specifications, and self-describing data.

Common design goals of Langzeitformate include platform independence, minimal reliance on proprietary technology, stable encoding, and rich metadata. Langzeitformat often incorporate features such as lossless or fidelity-preserving encodings, explicit character encoding (such as Unicode), and persistent identifiers. Documentation and community support are critical to avoid obsolescence, as well as clear provenance and versioning information.

Organizations manage Langzeitformate through a lifecycle approach: selecting candidate formats based on preservation use cases, performing format risk assessments, preserving multiple representations, and planning migrations or emulation as needed. Regular integrity checks, fixity, and metadata preservation are essential components of ongoing stewardship. Strategies may also include containerization, standardized packaging, and clear dependency documentation to facilitate future access.

Common examples used for long-term preservation include PDF/A for archival documents, TIFF and PNG for images, WAV or FLAC for audio, and XML-based formats for structured data. These formats are often accompanied by metadata standards and packaged in preservation-friendly containers such as METS or BagIt, with formal registration in format registries like PRONOM. The term Langzeitformat is widely discussed in library science, archives, and digital humanities as a criterion for sustainability rather than a single universal standard.

See also: digital preservation, open formats, format registries, emulation, data curation.