Topic: preforma news

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


veraPDF policy checking

The veraPDF software is capable of more than just PDF/A validation. It also provides a policy checker capable of carrying out custom PDF document checks beyond the scope of PDF/A validation. In this webinar we’ll be giving a demonstration of the policy checker, providing a brief, non-technical overview of the supporting technologies, helping you to get started, and showing how to report issues and get help. Continue reading


Results of the PREFORMA Innovation Workshop

Hosted at the Botanical Garden in Padua, the PREFORMA Innovation Workshop brought together more than 100 attendees interested in digital preservation and cultural heritage to present the open source conformance checkers developed in the project and discuss about the business models that can be built around them. The presentations delivered at the workshop are now available to download on the PREFORMA website. Continue reading


veraPDF 1.2 released

The latest version of veraPDF is now available to download on the PREFORMA Open Source Portal. This release is the first of the PREFORMA testing phase and it is focused on bug fixing and improvements of the test infrastructure, conformance checker and policy checker and on the improvement of the user documentation. Testing and user feedback is key to improving the software. Please download and test the latest release. If you encounter problems, or wish to suggest improvements, please add them to the project’s GitHub issue tracker. Continue reading


PREFORMA Starts Testing Phase

The third phase of the public PCP launched by PREFORMA started on 16 February 2017, with the virtual kick-off meeting of the testing phase. After an analysis of the results achieved and of the software released by the three suppliers that completed the prototyping phase in January 2017, the PREFORMA Evaluation Committee decided to award all the three consortia with a new contract. This phase will last until end of July 2017. Continue reading


MediaConch in use at Sound and Vision’s Winter School

For the second year in a row, Sound and Vision organised its Winter School for audiovisual archivists. Fourteen local and international collection specialists gathered in Hilversum last week. They strengthened their understanding of digital preservation concepts, heard about real-world implementations and learned from each other’s experiences. Continue reading