Library of Congress Recommended Formats Statement 2021-22

NISO Member News

Washington DC | July 8, 2021

The Library of Congress is excited to release the newest version of the Recommended Formats Statement. Over the last several months, the team of experts charged with maintaining, improving, and ensuring the accuracy of the Statement has been engaged in the annual process of examining the Statement and its content categories, to ensure that it correctly reflects the technical characteristics for best practices regarding preservation and long-term access. The team of experts has made considerable changes to this year’s Recommended Formats Statement with expanded content categories and format preferences (https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/).

This year marks the seventh anniversary of the first release of the Recommended Formats Statement and the first since the Library undertook a closer review and more thorough revision of the Statement in 2020, leading to what we call RFS 2.0.  The Library has been pleased to see the results of these efforts in the increased use of the RFS across the communities of content types.  Ensuring that the Statement is both accurate and useful is dependent on knowing from the stakeholders what needs to be updated and corrected to reflect current best practices.

The positive feedback received by the Library has meant that few major changes have been required for the latest version this year, though there are some notable updates within the category of geospatial and cartographic works in particular.

The Library of Congress is encouraged by the value its partners and stakeholders around the world have found in the Recommended Formats Statement, and they hope that the work undertaken this year will make the material even more useful.  They look forward to hearing your thoughts as you work with the Statement and taking them into consideration as they tackle the next annual revision in 2022.

For feedback, please use the Contacts information available on the LoC website.