Wednesday, April 08, 2009
GDFR + Pronom = UDFR
For some time, people working in digital preservation have been wondering what was happening with the Global Digital Format Registry (GDFR). The answer was: Not much. But a lot of discussions were happening on how to combine the openness of GDFR with the maturity of Pronom. Now it can be told: Planning for the Unified Digital Formats Registry (UDFR) has been announced.
The proposal and roadmap (PDF) states:
There are two major efforts underway to create a format registry with complimentary strengths and weaknesses. PRONOM, created by The National Archives (TNA) in the UK, has a strong technological base, and has been building a database of original information about various digital formats. PRONOM at this point however is owned and maintained by a single organization, making it vulnerable to changes in that institution. The Global Digital Formats Registry (GDFR) effort, hosted by Harvard University, has developed a model for a registry based on shared governance, cooperative data contribution, and distributed data hosting. However, GDFR is technically less far along in development, and has not yet begun database building. Given the paucity of resources in the digital preservation community it would be highly unfortunate if these efforts were to compete for resources. Therefore a group of involved and interested institutions have agreed to join together to create a single shared formats registry drawing on the individual strengths of the two existing efforts. The initiative would:
* be technically based on the existing PRONOM system and database; * create a community governance model for the registry involving all institutions willing to contribute to its development; * develop a mechanism for the distribution of the registry data in such a way as to support local extensions and additions to the database; * develop both technical and organizational support for distributed input to the registry, including some form of quality vetting of contributed data.
The start of the working group came at iPres in London last September, but I couldn't talk about it publicly then. The working group includes members from British Library, the California Digital Library, the Harvard University Libraries, the National Archives, the National Library of Australia, the National Library of New Zealand, Portico, and Tessella.
HUL has registered the domain udfr.org, but there is no content up yet.
