Memory institutions face increasing volumes of electronic documents and other media content for long term preservation. Data are normally stored in specific formats for documents, images, sound, video, etc., produced by software from different vendors. This software is controlled neither by the institution producing the files, nor by the institution that archives it. This obligates memory institutions to carry out conformance tests before accepting transfers of electronic collections, but again these are beyond the control of the institution and can be unreliable. This poses problems for long-term preservation. Digital content, meant for preservation, passing through an uncontrolled generative process can jeopardise the preservation process. The objective of PREFORMA (PREservation FORMAts for culture information/e-archives) – a Pre Commercial Procurement project co-funded by the European Commission under its FP7-ICT Programme – is to give memory institutions full control of the conformance testing of files created, migrated and ingested into archives. This is achieved through the development of open source tools which enable this process within an iteration that is under the full control of memory institutions. The project aims to establish a sustainable ecosystem involving interested stakeholders from a variety of backgrounds, including researchers, developers and memory institutions. The workshop will present the results of the project, including demonstration of the conformance checkers developed during the prototyping phase. This will inform a discussion with the digital preservation community – open source community, developers, standardization bodies and memory institutions – about the opportunities offered by PREFORMA and the challenges that are still to be addressed.

application/pdf