Code of Federal Regulations Title 28. Judicial Administration § 28.51.20 Form of submissions

(a) Submissions may be made in letter or any other written form.

(b) The Attorney General will accept certain machine readable data in the following electronic media:  3.5 inch 1.4 megabyte disk, compact disc read-only memory (CD–ROM) formatted to the ISO–9660/Joliet standard, or digital versatile disc read-only memory (DVD–ROM). Unless requested by the Attorney General, data provided on electronic media need not be provided in hard copy.

(c) All electronic media shall be clearly labeled with the following information:

(d) Each magnetic medium (floppy disk or tape) provided must be accompanied by a printed description of its contents, including an identification by name or location of each data file contained on the medium, a detailed record layout for each such file, a record count for each such file, and a full description of the magnetic medium format.

(e) Text documents should be provided in a standard American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) character code;  documents with graphics and complex formatting should be provided in standard Portable Document Format (PDF). The label shall be affixed to each electronic medium, and the information included on the label shall also be contained in a documentation file on the electronic medium.

(f) All data files shall be provided in a delimited text file and must include a header row as the first row with a name for each field in the data set. A separate data dictionary file documenting the fields in the data set, the field separators or delimiters, and a description of each field, including whether the field is text, date, or numeric, enumerating all possible values is required;  separators and delimiters should not also be used as data in the data set. Proprietary or commercial software system data files (e.g., SAS, SPSS, dBase, Lotus 1–2–3) and data files containing compressed data or binary data fields will not be accepted.