In June 2014, the PREFORMA project issued its call to tender. The main objective of the PREFORMA project is to oversee the development and deployment of an open source, software licensed, reference implementation for file format standards. The toolsets are aimed at any memory institution or organisation with a mandate to archive and preserve digital objects. The media types covered by the tender were: texts, still images and audio-visual records. The PREFORMA call required a conformance checker that:
- verifies whether a file has been produced according to the specifications of a standardised file format,
- verifies whether a file matches the acceptance criteria for long-term preservation by the memory institution,
- reports in human and machine readable format which properties deviate from the standard specification and acceptance criteria, and
- corrects relevant metadata in the preservation file.
We submitted submitted a response to the text strand, focussing on PDF/A under the name “VeraPDFa Consortium”.
PREFORMA chose two suppliers to proceed to the design phase for each media type. The successful six suppliers were announced in November 2014.