Topic: preforma news

Interview with Kieran O’Leary

This is the third in a series of interviews with people using MediaConch within their institutions. Kieran O’Leary has an intership with the Irish Film Archive within the Irish Film Institute, mostly working on code, workflows, metadata, digitisation, migration, and facilitating access to collections. He is using MediaConch’s GUI to check files delivered from vendors. MediaConch automates a lot of this work via local policy creation. Continue reading


Interview with Kathryn Gronsbell

Kathryn is Digital Collections Manager at Carnegie Hall and she develops and supports sustainable practices around the digital asset lifecycle to ensure the availability and integrity of material related to the Hall. MediaConch is part of Carnegie Hall’s pre-ingest procedures to check the quality of the vendor output against the digitization specs. 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


MediaConch in action! Issue #1

This is the first in a series of interviews with people using MediaConch within their institutions. Eddy Colloton is Assistant Conservator specializing in electronic media at the Denver Art Museum (DAM). DAM is planning to use MediaConch primarily for policy checking, as a form of quality assurance, to check that videotapes digitized by a vendor meet the museum’s target encoding and file format. 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


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