Global Digital Format Registry

Harvard University Library received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a two year project leading to the deployment of the Global Digital Format Registry (GDFR). The project will begin in February. A copy of the project proposal to the Mellon foundation can be downloaded from http://hul.harvard.edu/gdfr/documents/Proposal-2005-09-29.doc.

According to the web site:

The Global Digital Format Registry (GDFR) will provide sustainable distributed services to store, discover, and deliver representation information about digital formats.

The site goes on to say:

The wide diversity and rapid pace of adoption and abandonment of digital formats present an ongoing problem for long-term preservation efforts. As noted in the Library of Congress planning report, Preserving Our Digital Heritage: Plan for the National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP), "Longevity of digital data and the ability to read those data in the future depend upon standards for encoding and describing, but standards change over time." The purpose of the GDFR project is to address this concern by providing a sustainable resource for managing format-critical representation information necessary to the preservation function.

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