Tag: digital preservation

The PREFORMA Handbook

We are pleased to announce that The PREFORMA Handbook is now available to download. This publication is intended as a practical guidebook to be offered as a critical instrument to decision-makers in cultural heritage institutions, to support them in the analysis of problems and the identification of viable solutions, and as a technical reference to managers of digital archives and developers, to offer them guidance on how to use the PREFORMA tools. Continue reading


Interview with Brendan Coates

This is the seventh in a series of interviews with people using MediaConch within their institutions. Brendan is AudioVisual Digitization Technician at the University of California. He is using MediaConch both on the raw XDCAM captures, to make sure that they’re appropriate inputs to the ingest script, and on the outputs, to make sure the script is functioning correctly. Continue reading


Interview with Ben Turkus and Genevieve Havemeyer-King of NYPL

This is the sixth in a series of interviews with people using MediaConch within their institutions. Ben and Geneve work in the Audio and Moving Image Preservation Unit at at New York Public Library. MediaConch is an integral part of the Quality Control workflow to reformat audio and moving image research collections and specific policies have been created to this purpose. Continue reading


Life after PREFORMA: the future of veraPDF

The PREFORMA project that commissioned and funded the development of veraPDF draws to an end this year. Recent activity has been focused on PREFORMA acceptance testing, formalising the decisions of the PDF Association’s Technical Working Group and fixing issues reported by the community. In this webinar, the veraPDF Consortium will present the results of recent development and the plans for life after PREFORMA. Continue reading


PREFORMA: smart solutions for digital preservation

Digital preservation means taking precautions to ensure long-term access to digital content. It mitigates the risk of files becoming obsolete or unusable in the future. The PREFORMA tools help you validate incoming file formats and codecs against their standard specification, define custom acceptance criteria, and build an efficient ingest workflow. Download and try them from the PREFORMA Open Source Portal! Continue reading


Interview with Marion Jaks

Marion is a video archivist at the Austrian Mediathek, the Austrian video and sound archive. Her main area of work is the digitization of analogue videos and quality control of video files entering the digital archive. The main use case for MediaConch is to check if files that were produced outside of the default workflow procedure meet the policy for the archival master. Continue reading


DPF Manager 3.5 available to download

A new version of the DPF Manager has been released! There are several improvements in this update. The most significant one is the redesign of the reports section, where now it is easier (and much faster) to browse the analyzed reports, transforming between formats, and also converting a quick check to a full check. The global report has also been improved with a more visual and interactive panel. Download and try the new release on the PREFORMA Open Source Portal! Continue reading


DPF Manager 3.4 available to download

A lot of improvements and new features have been included in the new release of the DPF Manager. The most important changes are the inclusion of a Quick Check functionality that allows to perform a fast validation of the files, improved reports which include suggestions how to fix the errors that have been found in the collections and a new metadata fix to solve ascii encodings. The new release is available to download on the PREFORMA Open Source Portal. Try it! Continue reading


veraPDF 1.6 released

The latest release of veraPDF is available to download in the PREFORMA Open Source Portal. The validation logic and test corpus of veraPDF 1.6 have been updated to comply with the resolutions of the PDF Association’s PDF Validation Technical Working Group (TWG). The TWG brings together PDF technology experts to analyse PDF validation issues in a transparent way. To find out more about veraPDF and the PREFORMA project, join us at the PREFORMA International Conference in Tallinn on 11-12 October 2017. Continue reading


PREFORMA hands-on sessions in Europe

During May 2017, successful hands-on sessions and workshops have been organised by PREFORMA in several places 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