Sharing our expertise

Advice & guidance

Digital Preservation guidance notes provide concise, authoritative advice on specific topics related to the preservation and management of electronic records. Their intended audience is anyone involved in the creation of electronic records which may need to be preserved over the long term, and those responsible for preservation.

Planned future topics

Technical papers

Redaction of electronic material

Redaction toolkit: Guidelines for the editing of exempt infromation from paper and electronic documents prior to release can be accessed here: Redaction toolkit

DROID automatic format identification documentation (including XML schemas)

This technical report describes an identification method developed by The National Archives, which uses automated analysis of the binary structure of a digital object, and comparison with predefined internal and external ´signatures' for specific formats. The report can be accessed here: DROID automatic format identification documentation

PRONOM Technical Registry Unique Identifiers

The PRONOM Unique Identifier (PUID) is an extensible scheme for providing persistent, unique and unambiguous identifiers for file formats.

Planned future technical papers

We welcome feedback and suggestions for possible future topics, by email to digital-archive@nationalarchives.gov.uk

This page contains PDF and RTF files. See plug-ins and file formats for help in accessing these file types.