Born digital and digitized archives. Addressing the issue of file format obsolescence

The problem of file formats’ obsolescence poses a significant challenge to the long-term preservation of digital archives. Continuing technological developments make existing formats obsolete, necessitating their conversion to new formats to ensure their future usability. This problem affects both born digital and digitized records, and sometimes vendors encourage the transition to new file formats through planned obsolescence. To solve this problem, the strategy of file format conversion, which involves converting digital records from the old format to a more current one, has been generally proposed. However, although the importance of this strategy is widely recognized, at the practical level its implementation is still limited due to the lack of knowledge and expertise, operational guidelines and recommendations. This paper aims to provide some insights into these issues by outlining the rationale behind format reversion (Why), the choice of when to implement it (When) and the methodologies behind conversion (How), referring to both international standards and available guidelines.