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Lou Judson <[log in to unmask]> wrote: Is this a proper use of =93normalize=94 in the archivist industry? I would think standardize would be more correct. In the terminology of archives and digital preservation, normalize means to transfer files into preservation formats, that is, non-proprietary, or open source, or a format which will be reasonably easy to work with and read going into the future. For example, it is common to transfer from MS Word to PDF/A, since PDF/A is, for the moment, the more stable and non-proprietary format. This means that archivists need to be aware of formats that are becoming unusable for a variety of reasons, such as changing hardware standards, and they may need to re-normalize, either by going back to the original file, or if that is no longer possible, by migrating the normalized file to a new format. Exactly WHICH formats to normalize to is not at all standardized, which is probably why the term is "normalize", although that is just a guess of mine. -- Matt Snyder Archivist Special Collections Unit The New York Public Library [log in to unmask] -- Matt Snyder Archivist Special Collections Unit The New York Public Library [log in to unmask] Tel: 917-229-9582