The buyers group consisted of the following memory institutions: Swedish National Archives - Riksarkivet (SE), Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision - Beeld en Geluid (NL), Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage - KIK-IRPA (BE), Greek Film Center (GR), Local Government Management Agency (IE), Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation - SPK (DE), Girona City Council (ES), Estonian Ministry of Culture (EE), National Library of Sweden (SE). Riksarkivet (SE) acted as lead procurer of the buyers group.
Before starting the procurement the buyers group consulted memory institutions worldwide to create tender specifications that reflect commonly shared requirements and use cases. They consulted also industry and researchers to learn about technological developments.
The buyers group achieved its goal to bring to the market open source products that enable reliable assessment and correction of the increasing amount of electronic collections to be archived. PREFORMA helped companies (including in particular SMEs) and foundations to bring to the market reliable, standardised conformance checker tools and to raise the interest of the community to keep on investing in extending the high quality tools. Since the project ended, not only memory institutions from the buyers group have adopted the tools. The open source tools had already been downloaded more than 85.000 times by memory institutions from over 150 countries: 60% from EU, 30% from US and 10% from the rest of the world. And the number of downloads is still growing...
Read the full story about how the PREFORMA buyers group joined forces and generated this worldwide impact on long term digital preservation of cultural heritage. Find out what are the innovative solutions that were created and where to download them.