The National Archives’ Digital Archiving Department is undertaking a major refresh of PRONOM. For those unfamiliar with it, PRONOM is a file format registry whose data underpins many of the file format identification tools commonly used in digital preservation workflows, including DROID, Siegfried, Preservica and FIDO, among others.
The current PRONOM website and backend systems are nearly 25 years old and are becoming increasingly difficult to maintain, secure and develop in a sustainable and accessible way, so The National Archives has decided it is time to build a replacement.
A beta version of the new website is now available at https://pronom.nationalarchives.gov.uk, and the PRONOM team would welcome feedback as they work towards launching the new service. The team hopes that users will find it easier to use and more accessible than the previous website.
This is a slightly different address from the current PRONOM website, which continues to be available in the meantime at https://nationalarchives.gov.uk/pronom. The new address will become the long-term home for PRONOM, but appropriate redirection and other mechanisms will be put in place so that DROID and other applications should continue to function without requiring any changes.
The project also includes a major redesign of the underlying data infrastructure. Rather than being held in a private database, the primary copy of all PRONOM data is now stored publicly at https://github.com/nationalarchives/pronom.
More information about the project is available at https://pronom.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about.
The PRONOM team hopes that the refreshed platform will become the official PRONOM service by the end of the year and would value feedback from the digital preservation community. Whether comments relate to the new website, search functionality or the underlying data structure, they can be shared through the feedback form available at the top of every page of the new website.
The team is also keen to connect with organizations and individuals who develop tools and software that rely on PRONOM data, to better understand how the proposed changes could affect existing implementations before the transition to the new service. Workshops or discussions with this particular community of users are planned ahead of the transition. Anyone who would like to be involved can contact the team at pronom@nationalarchives.gov.uk.
The PRONOM team also hosts regular open drop-in sessions:
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Every two weeks on Thursday at 16:00 (UK) / 11:00 (ET)
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The last Wednesday of every month at 07:00 (UK) / 16:00 (AET)
Further information on dates and joining instructions is available at https://github.com/digital-preservation/PRONOM_Research/blob/main/Resources/drop-in.md.