The U.S. National Archives (NARA) is pleased to announce that it has released updates to its Digital Preservation Framework on GitHub:
https://github.com/usnationalarchives/digital-preservation
The framework is a set of documents that describe how we identify risks to digital files and prioritize them for action, identify the essential preservation characteristics for 16 different categories of electronic records, and plan for the preservation of over 500 file formats. The framework documents the National Archives' current capabilities and practices, which will evolve over time.
This release incorporates feedback received from the 2019 draft release of the framework. Several dozen comments were received from Federal agencies, the private sector, stakeholders and subject matter experts during the public comment period from September to November, 2019. NARA received comments that included suggestions for the structure of the plans, feedback about the proposed preservation actions, and additional formats that should be covered in addition to our own continued work.
Updates include a new Preservation Action Plan for Calendar records, over 150 new file format variants, and expanded links to other resources. Additionally, the Presentation Action Plans for individual file formats are now presented in a spreadsheet for increased navigability and so the plans can be more easily incorporated into the work of other organizations.
As always, we encourage comments and discussion on the plans using the GitHub Issues feature on these or any other topics:
What revisions can you suggest to the proposed processing and preservation actions for the formats?
Are the Essential Characteristics for each record type comprehensive enough for digital preservation?
Are the proposed preservation actions for the formats technically appropriate?
Are there appropriate tools for processing and preservation of specific formats that we do not have listed?
Are there other formats we haven’t identified that need plans?
We will take comments and incorporate them into new versions which will also be released. This is an ongoing initiative to assess risk and to update and create new plans over time.
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