Home › Tech Notes ›

File naming conventions

*** This is very preliminary ***

As we create content and digitize images, oral histories, transcripts, etc. we need to adopt well-defined file naming conventions so that these electronic files can be quickly and unambiguously identified. To that end, here is a proposed standard:

Rules:

  1. Only use lower-case - since linux is case-sensitive, this will avoid problems.
  2. No spaces - the web cannot handle spaces in file names, so it's best not to use them in our file names. Periods, underscores, and hyphens are all good substitutes, but I propose we use a hyphen as our standard replacement for a space since it can be seen when underlined, as is the case with links. Since we've already adopted periods in the accession number, it makes sense to stick with that, but only for the accession number part of the name
  3. Start with accession number - since this is our basic identifier it makes sense to start with it.
  4. General to specific - Refinements to further specify the file name should come at the end of the filename, so that we can still easily search and list related objects because they share the same starting accession number. By putting the most specific information at the end of the filename, the related files will sort together, and can be accessed easily with regular expressions

With these rules in mind, here are a few 'valid' file names:

The following names all share the same file name, but differ only in the file-type, which is fine:

2007.500.144-eartha.mp3
2007.500.144-eartha.wav
2007.500.144-eartha.odt

Notice that the name 'eartha' is there to help us see what it is. Without that, we'd have to remember what the number refers to, which would be difficult when you're looking at 1000 files.

Here are three more names which have refinements at the end to help resolve different versions:

2007.500.144-eartha-a.wav
2007.500.144-eartha-b.wav
2007.500.144-eartha-c.wav

The refinement specifier should contain information that helps identify the nature of the differences, for example, the following might be used to resolve between two different image resolutions:

2007.500.144-eartha-1600x1200.jpg
2007.500.144-eartha-640x480.jpg

We will develop standard conventions for these kind of differences as we evolve this naming spec.

Comments

Naming conventions

Submitted by Matt Russell on Wed, 2008-01-02 23:21.

This is just what we need before we do too many and lose track of which tape is what - now regarding the image naming - if we are attaching images to an online website do we need file name with the resolutions ?

Images for the website

Submitted by Barbara Brown on Wed, 2008-01-02 23:48.

We can use any filenames we want for attaching images to the website, but since these images are developed locally (eg. on PCs on our network) it makes sense to use the same filename conventions while the files are on those PCs. However, to keep it simple, we could rename them before we put them on the web. It is becoming more and more important for the images on the website to be able to know what an image is just by looking at the filename, since there are many of them, and there will be many more. We are going to need to establish file naming and directory naming conventions for the website. Soon.