Tag: file format validation

Open Source Tools for Validation in the Digital Archive Workflow

Merle Friedrichsen attended the “No Time To Wait 2” symposium organised by PREFORMA in November 2017 and gave a presentation on “Open Source Tools in the Digital Archive Workflow” from the perspective of the German National Library of Science and Technology. They both veraPDF (PDF/A), and MediaConch (for Matroska/FFV1 – for film) and the result is that all the requirements that they identified regarding open source software for validation are fulfilled (or are possible to fulfill) by these tools. Continue reading


Interview with Brian E. Davis of Oregon State University

This is the nineth in a series of interviews with people using MediaConch within their institutions. Brian is the head of the Digital Production Unit for the Special Collections & Archives Research Center at Oregon State University Libraries & Press. He is using MediaConch for validation and policy checking during the quality control process for the video files. He also used DPF Manager and veraPDF for quality control of TIFF and PDF files. Continue reading


Shaping our future memory standards (2/2)

Hosted by the National Library of Estonia, the PREFORMA International Conference “Shaping our future memory standards” brought together 150 people worldwide to discuss the importance of standardisation and file format validation for the long term preservation of digital cultural content, discover the potential of the open source conformance checkers developed in PREFORMA and look at future challenges and opportunities. Continue reading


Shaping our future memory standards (1/2)

Hosted by the National Library of Estonia, the PREFORMA International Conference “Shaping our future memory standards” brought together 150 people worldwide to discuss the importance of standardisation and file format validation for the long term preservation of digital cultural content, discover the potential of the open source conformance checkers developed in PREFORMA and look at future challenges and opportunities. Continue reading


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 Julia Kim

Julia Kim is the Digital Assets Specialist at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. So far, she has primarily used MediaConch to create reports for new and incoming born-digital video from the Civil Rights History Project and the DPX files from digitizing celluloid film. 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


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


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