PRONOM Technical Registry

PRONOM Technical Registry

PRONOM is a web-based technical registry to support digital preservation services, developed by The National Archives of the United Kingdom. PRONOM was the first and remains, to date, the only operational public file format registry in the world, although the "Magic File" repository of the File Command has served this role in a less formal capacity for two decades. Other projects to develop technical registries, including the UK Digital Curation Centre's Representation Information Registry, and the Global Digital Format Registry project at Harvard University, are now in progress.

PRONOM's origins lie in a requirement to have access to reliable technical information about the electronic records held by The National Archives. By definition, electronic records are not inherently human-readable - file formats encode information into a form which can only be processed and rendered comprehensible by very specific technological environments. The accessibility of that information is therefore highly vulnerable to technological obsolescence. Technical information about the structure of those file formats, and the software and hardware environments required to support them, is therefore a prerequisite for any digital preservation regime. PRONOM was developed to provide this function, initially as an internal resource for National Archives staff, and subsequently as public, web-based resource.