The Format Policy Registry, or FPR, is an attempt to build a structured way for digital preservation practitioners to share and improve their preservation planning strategies over time. The Archivematica project team has recognized the need for a better way to manage preservation plans, which we address in terms of format policies. Format policies are the business rules and tool commands for format identification, extraction, normalization, verification and transcription. Format policies will change as community standards, practices and tools evolve. Currently, the FPR is hosted at fpr.archivematica.org, and users can update the Preservation Planning tab FPR in their local Archivematica dashboard iterations with Artefactual defaults. However, the goal of the FPR is to have a front-facing host site where users can also share their local policies with other users, including statistics about how successful those policies have been. This would lead to more educated decision-making about format policies over time. Such a resource cannot be created alone, so this presentation would be a launching point for gauging community interest to help continue building the FPR functionality.

1. Format Policy Registry (FPR)
Making sense of migration strategies as a Community
SAA 2014 – Research Forum
Courtney C. Mumma, MAS/MLIS, Archivematica product manager
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

2. Why the FPR?
simplify preservation planning
keep current as community standards, practices and tools
improve over time
allow Archivematica users to download and edit the most current
defaults
allow Archivematica users to add their own rules, tools and
commands based on their local preservation plans
aggregate empirical information about institutional format policies
to better identify community best practices

3. We were guilty, too

4. format policy = rules + tools + commands

5. format policies exist for:
format identification
characterization
normalization to access and preservation
extraction
transcription
verification

6. interface with PRONOM (660)

8. identification
fido or extension
Other tools can be added
results are basis of other
format policy actions

10. normalization rules
for access,
preservation and
thumbnails (for
internal search)

11. extraction

12. transcription

13. dashboard decision-making

14. preconfiguring policy decisions

15. FPR future
front-facing server website – better usability
ability to upload local policies and share reasoning
leverage FPR for shared experimentation with format policies
and preservation planning
interface with other registries, including linked data
FPR as a service, partner with other FOSS projects
and ????????

16. archivematica.org
Twitter: @archivematica
Online demo:
sankofa.archivematica.org
User: demo@example.com
Password: demodemo
Me: courtney@artefactual.com
@arxiverdama
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