Figure 4: Table of Standards for Different Types of Data
Reproduced from DLM-Forum on Electronic Records, Guidelines on Best Practices for Using Electronic Information: How to Deal with Machine-readable Data and Electronic Documents. Updated and enlarged edition. (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 1997).
Name
|
International standard or profile
|
European standard or profile
|
Other specification
|
Description
| Storage Media |
½ inch tape cartridge
|
ISO 8462-1
|
|
|
Half-inch tapes come also in the form of 9-track reels. The tapes themselves are relatively cheap but they require expensive tape drives.
|
3 ½ inch floppy disk
|
ISO/IEC 9529-1
ISO/IEC 9529-2
|
EN 29529-1
EN 29529-2
|
|
Have a storage capacity of from 400K to 1.4MB of data. The most common sizes for PC are 720K (double-density) and 1.44 (high-density). Macintoshes support disks of 400K, 800K and 1.2MB.
|
CD-ROM
|
ISO 9660
ISO 10149
|
|
|
Short for Compact Disc Read-Only-Memory. A type of optical disk capable of storing large amounts of data – up to 1GB, although the most common size is 650MB. A single CD-ROM has the storage capacity of 700 floppy disks.
|
DAT cartridge
|
|
|
|
Acronym for Digital Audio Tape, a type of magnetic tape that uses a scheme called helical scan to record data. A DAT cartridge is slightly larger than a credit card in width and height and contains a magnetic tape that can hold from 2 to 24 gigabytes of data. It can support data transfer rates of about 2 MBps. Like other types of tapes, DATs are sequential-access.
|
DVD
|
Under preparation
|
|
|
Short for Digital Versatile Disk or Digital Video Disk, a new type of CD-ROM that holds a minimum of 4.7GB, enough for a full-length movie. Many experts believe that DVD disks, called DVD-ROMs, will eventually replace CD-ROMs, as well as VHS video cassettes and laser disks. The DVD specification supports disks with capacities from 4.7 GB to 17GB and access rates of 600 KBps to 1.3 MBps. They are backward-compatible with CD-ROMs.
|
Figure 5: Table of Selected Information Technology Standards of Relevance to Record Keeping
Name
|
International standard or profile
|
European standard or profile
|
Other specification
|
Description
| Storage Media |
WORM
|
There is no single standard for WORM disks, which means that they can only be read by the same type of drive that wrote them.
|
Short for Write Once Read Many, an optical disk technology that allows you to write data onto a disk just once. After that, the data is permanent and can be read any number of times
|
Photo CD
|
Proprietary standard patented by Eastman Kodak Company
|
Photo CD was introduced by Kodak as a means of storing high quality digital colour images, captured from continuous-tone film, as a digital signal on a CD-ROM disc.
| Bit-mapped graphics1 and vector graphics2 |
CAD graphics
|
|
|
|
Acronym for Computer-Aided Design. It enables engineers and architects to design everything from furniture to aeroplanes.
|
CGM graphics
|
ISO/IEC 8632: 1992
|
|
|
Abbreviation for Computer Graphics Metafile, a file format designed by several standards organisations and formally ratified by ANSI.3 It is designed to be the standard vector graphics file format and is supported by a wide variety of software and hardware products.
|
Figure 5: Table of Selected Information Technology Standards of Relevance to Record Keeping (cont.)
Name
|
International standard or profile
|
European standard or profile
|
Other specification
|
Description
| Bit-mapped graphics and vector graphics (continued) |
GIF graphics
|
CompuServe Inc provides royalty-free limited-use licence to users.
|
Stands for Graphics Interchange Format, a bit-mapped graphics file format used by the World Wide Web, CompuServe and many on-line bulletin boards. It includes data compression, making it especially effective for scanned photos
|
GKS
|
ISO/IEC 7942
|
|
|
Short for Graphical Kernel System. GKS is a machine, language, operating system and device-independent specification of a set of services for displaying and interacting with 2-dimensional pictures.
|
Group III fax
|
ITU-T group III
|
|
|
A universal protocol defined by the CCITT4 for sending fax documents across telephone lines.
|
Group IV fax
|
ITU-T group IV
|
|
|
A protocol for sending fax documents over ISDN networks.
|
JPEG graphics
|
ISO/IEC 10918
ISO/IEC DIS 14495-1
|
|
|
Short for Joint Photographic Experts Group. Although it can reduce graphics files to about 5% of their normal size, some detail is lost in the compression
|
Figure 5: Table of Selected Information Technology Standards of Relevance to Record Keeping (cont.)
Name
|
International standard or profile
|
European standard or profile
|
Other specification
|
Description
| Bit-mapped graphics and vector graphics (continued) |
MPEG-1 video
|
ISO/IEC 11172:1993
|
|
|
Short for Moving Picture Experts Group – a working group of ISO. MPEG is part of a family of digital video compression standards and file formats. The most common implementations of the MPEG-1 standard provide video resolution of 352-by-240 at 30 frames per second (fps). This produces video quality slightly below the quality of conventional VCR videos.
|
MPEG-2 video
|
ISO/IEC 13818: 1995
|
|
|
MPEG-2 offers resolutions of 720x480 and 1280x720 at 60 fps, with full CD-quality audio. This is sufficient or all the major TV standards, including NTSC and even GDTV. It is used by DVD-ROMs. MPEG-2 can compress a 2 hour video into a few gigabytes.
|
MPEG-4 video
|
ISO/IEC DIS 14496-1 (Draft)
|
|
|
High-compression version of MPEG-2.
|
TIFF graphics
|
Proprietary format developed by Aldus Corporation (now owned by Adobe) and Microsoft.
|
Acronym for Tagged Image File Format, one of the most widely supported file formats for storing bit-mapped images on PCs. Files in TIFF format often end with a .tif extension.
|
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