Pre-commercial procurement project helps with digital archiving of historical materials
As digital storage becomes the norm, libraries, archives, museums and other organisations tasked with preserving materials for public record must learn to catalogue their files electronically. Media types such as documents, images, and audio-visual records are capable of being stored in a range of formats, many of which are not regulated and may quickly become obsolete, rendering them unsuitable for future preservation.
To address this challenge, the PREFORMA (PREservation FORMAts for culture information/e-archives) project has published a pre-commercial procurement (PCP) tender to help organisations implement standardised file formats for preserving data content in the long term. Through the PCP, open source software for file format standards will be developed. Memory institutions will have full control over necessary conformity tests before files are ingested into archives.
The implementation of the file format standards will consist of a set of modular tools, which will be developed in an iterative process with multiple releases and a number of experiments with ‘real’ data sets files. The process is designed to give institutions control at each step. The PCP will involve a range of stakeholders, including cultural heritage organisations, developers and coders, research organisations, standardisation bodies, and funding agencies. The PEFORMA project is co-funded by the European Commission under its FP7-ICT Programme.
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