AC 03. 2023

Date: October 13, 2022 

Memorandum to Federal Agency Contacts: Updates to File Format Guidance: E57, Geopackage, and SIARD Formats

I am pleased to announce that NARA has updated Appendix A: Table of File Formats of NARA Bulletin 2014-04, Format Guidance for the Transfer of Permanent Electronic Records.

We have updated the Computer Aided Design (CAD) category to add E57 as a preferred format for the transfer of permanent point clouds, images, and metadata produced by 3D imaging systems, such as laser scanners. 

We have updated the Geospatial Formats category to add Geopackage Encoding Standard as a preferred format for geospatial data.

We have updated the Structured Data Formats category in the table to add Software Independent Archiving of Relational Databases (SIARD) as a preferred format for the transfer of permanent relational databases.

If you would like to discuss transferring permanent relational databases to NARA using SIARD, please contact etransfers@nara.gov. If you have any questions about the other formats, please contact rmstandards@nara.gov.

LAURENCE BREWER
Chief Records Officer
for the U.S. Government