Digitizing Collections: FIle Naming

1. Planning 
2. Selection
3. Digitizing materials
4. Processing files, creating master and access files
5. Metadata creation or re-purposing
6. Digital preservation of master files
7. Presentation of access files in an online content management platform

Create a file naming convention

It is important to develop a file naming convention for your digital collections. This is a set way or pattern for how to constructing file names. It should be determined before you begin creating digital files to ensure consistency and organization.

Best practices for file naming

• Use descriptive names to identify the content/purpose of files 
• Avoid illegal characters: > < " / \ | ? * : ^ $ (These characters may have special meanings in operating systems and could cause problems)
• Avoid periods or commas to avoid problems in systems that handle these differently.
• Avoid underscores because they don't show up well in URLS and because CONTENTdm uses underscores to indicate where text for a caption begins
• Avoid spaces in filenames (due to problems with browsers and some operating systems):
  • ​Use dashes between words (i.e. faculty-meeting-minutes)
• Consider only using lowercase letters, some systems and all web browsers are case sensitive.
• Try to limit the length to 27 characters. Most operating systems allow more characters than this but limiting it will help make your files more interpretable with other systems.
• Do not begin nor end a file name with a dash or other punctuation
• Do not use double dashes in a row or other double punctuation in a file name
• Only use standard file extensions and make sure to only have one