[OpenGLAM] PREFORMA Starts Prototyping Phase

[Erwin Verbruggen]

Dear colleagues,

For the preservation-inclined: the PREFORMA Project has recently entered
its prototyping phase by awarding contracts to the suppliers veraPDF
consortium, Easy Innova and MediaArea.

See the message below or feel free to get in touch for more info.

Kind regards,
Erwin Verbruggen
Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision


*PREFORMA Starts Prototyping Phase *

*veraPDF consortium, Easy Innova and MediaArea start development on open
source file compliance checkers for documents, still images and moving
image materials.*

The prototyping phase of the public pre-commercial procurement project
PREFORMA started on April 14th 2015, with the announcement of the three
winners. The aim of PREFORMA (http://www.preforma-project.eu/) is to
develop an open-source toolset for the conformance checking of digital
files intended for long-term preservation in memory institutions.

After analysing the technical and functional specifications submitted by
the six groups that completed the design phase in March 2015 , PREFORMA
chose the three consortia awarded with contracts for the prototyping phase.
This phase will last until December 2016.

The three awardees are the veraPDF Consortium (led by the Open Preservation
Foundation and the PDF Association), who will work on the compliance
checker for the PDF/A standard for documents; Easy Innova, who will work on
the TIFF standard for digital still images; and MediaArea, who will work on
a set of open source standards for moving images, namely: the Matroska
wrapper, the FFv1 video codec and LPCM for audio streams.

Börje Justrell, coordinator of the PREFORMA project, said: “*For archives
and libraries it is imperative that they understand what’s in the digital
objects they are preserving for generations. The open source PREFORMA
toolset, which brings together the three solutions from the awardees, helps
cover the currently existing knowledge gap. The openness of the solution
will allow extension of the software with checkers for other file formats,
should new requirements emerge.*”

Antonella Fresa, technical coordinator of the project, said: “*We are lucky
to work with these strong organisations on the PREFORMA challenge - and
would like to express our thanks to the three other consortia who also did
valuable work during the design phase: Preservica, KU Leuven – Libis
Library IT Services and Université Catholique de Louvain.*”

Suppliers and memory institutions interested in participating in and
contributing to the prototyping phase are invited to follow the progress on
the PREFORMA Open Source Portal (
http://www.preforma-project.eu/open-source-portal.html) and to join the
PREFORMA community (http://www.preforma-project.eu/community.html).
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