PRONOM Research Week is a yearly initiative over the course of a week to help focus community effort on addressing the gaps in PRONOM and making the database better! Based on previous research weeks in 2019 and 2020, the PRONOM Team would like to announce the return of PRONOM Research Week for 2024. PRONOM Research Week is a great opportunity to get involved in contributing to PRONOM. You can read more about what PRONOM is and about our work in our blog post which celebrated PRONOM's 100th release!
We will be holding a welcome event on Microsoft Teams at 16:00 GMT 7th November for an informal Q&A and chat!
We want everyone to have the opportunity to get involved (if they would like to)! There are so many ways that you can help without having to look inside a file! For example you could help us write descriptions for our file formats, help us by suggesting extensions or MIME Types or help by adding to our documentation.
Is your skill in cataloguing and research? Amazing! For those of you who may not want to analyse the contents of files we'd still love your help. Many of the file formats in PRONOM do not have a description! They only have what we call 'Outline Descriptions'. We have set up a Google Sheet (so no GitHub account necessary). Full instructions are within the sheet but it's pretty simple, your description and how we can credit you can be inputted in there.
For those who want to correct the signatures within PRONOM, analyse hex or submit full file formats. You may have a file format that hasn't been identifying that you wish to create a siganture for or noticed something that isn't in PRONOM. A full list of file formats in PRONOM can be found here as of v.108. Stuck for inspiration? An updated list of file formats with no signatures can be found here.
This page provides useful information for anyone interested in file format research and contributing to PRONOM: The Technical Repository. We have put together resources our GitHub page to get you started in file format research or answer any questions if you get stuck. You can find much more information about our submission process and resources on the main page of this repository.
We have created this Starter Pack which is now also available in Spanish to make it easier for anyone to research file formats. The guide is divided into easy to follow Ready, Set, GO! structure and includes a Content page so whether you have researched file formats before, or you are just getting started you can easily navigate across the pages to find the most relevant information.
To make your file format research easier to follow, and to make submitting to PRONOM easier, we have created two templates one in Microsoft Word document format and other in Microsoft Excel spreadsheet format so you can choose your preffered working document. These templates serve as a guidance only and we are always grateful to receive as little, or as a lot, information as possible.
You can also submit information regarding file formats to us using pull requests on GitHub which we then collect and merge into our Submission folder for Research Week so you can keep track of how we process your submission. You can also email us your research, our email is available in the contact information.