Topic: media

Preservation courses at the IS&T conference Archiving 2017

Report of the course about formats for preservation organised by PREFORMA in Riga in the framework of the IS&T (Society for Imaging Science and Technology) conference Archiving 2017. The participants were introduced to an abstract and a generic overview of the meaning of “format” and digital preservation. Within that framework the value and importance of a Conformance Checker and what makes a format appropriate in a specific user case was explored. Continue reading


MediaConch Newsletter #10 – June 2017

We are pleased to announce the progress we’ve made this year. There are new updates to MediaConch that expand its capabilities, user stories to share, and new events related to implementation checking and the standardization of open audiovisual formats. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you’d like to join our community, be involved in our usability testing and integrate the software in your workflow! Continue reading


DPF Manager v3.3 released and available to download

We present a new update of the DPF Manager. This new version can be downloaded as usual from the PREFORMA Open Source Portal. This new version includes several improvements and fixes. One of the most interesting new features is the Statistics Module. This new section reports the most usual tags found in the analyzed files, as well as their values. Also from the ISOs validated, it is shown the errors that have been found ordered by frequency. Continue reading


PREFORMA International Conference

The PREFORMA project invites all the members of the digital preservation community to attend the International Conference – Shaping our future memory standards, which will be held in Tallinn on 11-12 October 2017. The event is a great opportunity to ask and exchange with international experts, fellow archivists and even Open Source developers about file format questions, issues and challenges we are facing today. Continue reading


DPF Manager v3.2.1 released and available to download

The new version of DPF Manager is now ready to download from the PREFORMA Open Source Portal! This update solves some bugs that have been posted by the users in the Github issue tracker, and includes some enhancements. In addition, a new repository has been created to collect sample files to be used for testing and validation of the DPF Manager, and all the possible TIFF errors have been defined and classified. Continue reading


File formats for preservation

Riksarkivet (the Swedish National Archive) has been invited to the IS&T conference Archiving 2017 to hold a course about file formats for preservation on the 15th of May. The course will take the form of a workshop with the purpose to concretise the work done in Riksarkivet’s research and development program ArkivE 2.0 by using the tools developed in the PREFORMA project. Continue reading


veraPDF 1.4 released and available to download

We are pleased to announce that the new release of veraPDF, the open source file format validator for PDF/A documents, is available to download on the PREFORMA Open Source Portal. veraPDF 1.4 has a new GUI wizard for creating custom policy files. Significant performance optimisations have been made to the greenfield PDF parser. Testing and user feedback is key to improving the software. Please download and use the latest release. Continue reading


PREFORMA presented at OPATL in Girona

Sònia Oliveras i Artau from Girona City Council, one of the memory institutions participating as procurers in PREFORMA, presented the PREFORMA project to the Permanent Observatory of Archives and Local Televisions (OPATL) in Girona, a collaboration project started in 2008 with its main aim to preserve the local television heritage at the regions of Catalonia and Andorra. Continue reading


DPF Manager v3.2 released and available to download

DPF Manager, the most advanced TIFF conformance checker for digital preservation, has been updated to version 3.2. This new version, which is now available to download from the PREFORMA Open Source Portal, includes several new features, improvements and some bug fixes. We invite all users interested to check the correctness of their TIFF files to try it, and don’t forget to give us feedback to continue improving the project! Continue reading


PREFORMA Hands-on Sessions

Now that the PREFORMA prototypes are complete and functionally stable, the PREFORMA project is organising a series of hands-on session and training seminars to explain to the participants what does conformance checking mean, why is file format validation so important in long-term digital preservation, how to create their own policy profiles and how to download, install, configure and use the conformance checker to analyse their files. Continue reading