As you might know, the PREFORMA project works on one of the main challenges memory institutions are facing nowadays: the long-term preservation of digital data.

If your memory institution is working with or is helping to refine open source tools, please share your experiences via this survey. It should take about 20 minutes to complete, and you can skip questions that are not relevant to your situation.

The main objective of the PREFORMA project is to give memory institutions full control of the process of conformity testing of the digital files to be created, migrated and ingested into archives. For this reason, the project is developing three open source tools that control whether a file complies with the standard specifications and with the acceptance criteria of the memory institution. The standards under consideration are: PDF/A for electronic documents, uncompressed TIFF for images and a combination of MKV, FFv1 and LPCM for AV files.

The software development is carried out in a collaborative environment with memory institutions and experts. The project seeks to establish a sustainable community that ensures long-term availability of the software, generates useful feedback for those who control it and continually improves the standard specifications.

Fully functional prototypes of the conformance checkers are available to download in the PREFORMA Open Source Portal.

Your cooperation is greatly appreciated, and will help to shape future memory standards! For further questions, contact Claudio Prandoni of the PREFORMA project. The survey can be found here.