File Naming Conventions

The AMI Montessori Archives observes the following conventions for file naming.

• Use a consistent file naming convention.
• Document the file naming convention.
• File names must be unique.
• File names should be short but descriptive (less than 25 characters) (Briney, 2015).
• File names should have a distinctive, human-readable name that gives an indication of the content.
• Date format is as per ISO 8601 (YYYYMMDD).
• In order to ensure natural language sorting for a series of filenames that are numbered:
  • use a double zero “00” prefix for numbers 1 to 9 (e.g., 001 002 003);
  • use a single zero “0” prefix for numbers 10 to 99 (e.g., 097 098 099);
  • use no leading “0” for numbers 100 and above; and
  • avoid using words such as “front”, “cover”, “verso” or “frontispiece” to indicate specific pages and use numbers as above instead.
• Do not include special characters in the filename.
• Do not include spaces in the filename.
• File names should only include the characters a to z, the numbers 0 to 9, underscores “_” and hyphens “-”.
• Use pothole case (e.g., two_words):
  • underscores are used to replace spaces and to delimit words; and 
  • all words are in lower case.
• Have a file extension that matches the file format and where applicable use “.tiff” in preference to “.tif” and “.jpeg” in preference to “.jpg”.
• The file extension is in lowercase.
• Order the elements in a filename in the most appropriate way to retrieve and identify the file, with words in descending order of relevance, for example:
  • surname_firstname_date_location_other.tiff
  • montessori_maria_19300801_barcelona.tiff
  • montessori_maria_1927_london_standing.tiff
  • montessori_maria_1927_london_seated.tiff
  • publication_volume_issue_year_number.tiff
  • namta_v1_n1_1975_001.tiff
• The order of the components in the title of a digital object will follow a similar convention, separated by commas:
  • Maria Montessori, 1887
  • Maria Montessori, 1950, Perugia, Students
  • Maria and Mario Montessori, 1950, Perugia, Students
• For versions of the same digital object with the same file format, human-readable words will be appended to differentiate each file, for example:
  • montessori_maria_1887_original.jpeg
  • montessori_maria_1887_cropped.jpeg
  • montessori_maria_1887_grayscale.jpeg
  • montessori_maria_1887_bw.jpeg (black and white)
  • montessori_maria_1887_duo.jpeg (duotone)
• The display version of the file, that has been edited and enhanced for presentation purposes, will not have any additional words appended, for example:
  • montessori_maria_1887.jpeg
• Organise files into directories (when necessary) that follow a consistent pattern.
• Avoid repetition of semantic elements among directory and file names.

References

K. Briney, Data Management for Researchers (Pelagic Publishing, Exeter, 2015)

National Archives, Federal Records Management, NARA Bulletin 2015-04 Appendix B

Library of Congress, Summary of Digital Format Preferences

FADGI Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials: Third Edition

PRONOM File Format Registry

ScienceDirect, File Naming Convention

Smithsonian Data Management Best Practices Naming and Organizing Files

The University of Edinburgh, Records Management, Naming Conventions

ISO 8601: Date and Time Format