Presentation was delivered during the joint DPE/Planets/CAPAR/nestor training event, ‘The Preservation challenge: basic concepts and practical applications’ (Barcelona, March 2009). It starts by looking at the principle of a "file format", get a hands on feeling for the difference in quality file formats provide for long term preservation and discuss, what formats to choose for what. Then continues by some theory, using the example of the European commission project Planets, to show how a consistently dynamic approach looks like, who tries to evaluate the performance of migration tools moving from one format to another, based on automatic analysis of the characteristics of files. This presentation concludes with some thoughts which characteristics of digital files doe not reside in the file, but in the software which is used to display it and how the approaches discussed before can be extended to take care of these problems.

PART I What is in a format?(Formats and Registries) PART II What is not in a format? (Formats in PLANETS –and beyond) EXERCISE II

Presentation, which was delivered during the first DPE/Planets/nestor training event (Vilnius, October 2007)is about file formats of digital preservation (tiff; pdf; xml, etc.); demand of the registries; and formats for DP in PLANETS.

To understand specifics of various formats in digital preservation.