ISO 5820 has just been published as a new standard, detailing a platform-independent format for storing and archiving hyper-spectral datasets. This could be as simple as an electron image or as complicated as a full x-ray spectral map + EBSD + CL + … The format was developed by an international team led by Nestor Zaluzec at Argonne National Labs and is based on tagged data in a plain text file detailing what data is stored in a binary file and how it is formatted. Hopefully it’ll find traction and allow us to store our hard-earned data without fear that we’ll lose access to it when we change our instrument.