In order to maximize accessibility and ensure long term preservation, please use on of the following non-proprietary formats.
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Tables, spreadsheets, and databases
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- Portable Document Format (.pdf)
- Tab-separated tables (.txt – sometimes .tsv or .tab)
- Comma-separated tables (.csv or .txt)
- Other standard delimiter (e.g. colon, pipe)
- Fixed-width
- OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods)
- OpenDocument Database (.ods)
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Multidimensional arrays
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- Common Data Format (.cdf)
- Network Common Data Format (.nc)
- Hierarchical Data Format (usually .hdf or .h5)
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Statistics
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- Data Documentation Initiative (.xml)
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Web data
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- Javascript Object Notation (.json)
- Extensible Markup Language (.xml)
- Hypertext Markup Language (.html)
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Image files
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- JPEG (.jpg or .jp2)
- Portable Network Graphics (.png)
- Scalable Vector Graphics (.svg)
- TIFF (.tiff or .tif)
- Portable Document Format (.pdf)
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Sound files
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- WAVE (.wav)
- FLAC (.flac)
- MPEG-3 (mp3—may not be suitable for high-fidelity audio)
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Video files
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- MPEG-4 (mp4)
- JPEG2 2000 (mj2)
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Geospatial data
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- Geo-Referenced TIFF (.tiff)
- ESRI Shapefile (.shp, .shx, .dbf)
- Keyhole Mark Language (.kml)
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Software code
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- Plain text (usually with an extension that represents the source language)
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Text
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- Plain text (.txt)
- Portable Document Format (.pdf)
- LaTeX documents (.tex)
- Hypertext Markup Language (.html)
- Open Document Format (.odt)
- Extensible Markup Language (.xml)
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E-books
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