New and revised Specifications issued

Public Record Office Victoria (PROV) has issued new and revised Specifications under PROS 19/05 Create Capture and Control Standard. 

The PROS 19/05 Standard and Specifications directly support PROV’s Victorian Electronic Records Strategy (VERS) to ensure the creation, capture and preservation of authentic, complete and meaningful digital records by the Victorian public sector.

See VERS: Digital Forever 2018–2021 for more information about the Strategy

The PROS 19/05 Standard now has five Specifications:

About the revised Specification

PROS 19/05 S3 Long Term Sustainable Formats Specification has been revised to include additional formats that are likely to remain readable and usable for the long term. It now includes an appendix with explanatory information. 

Permanent value digital records must be either held in or converted to one of the specified formats prior to transfer to PROV as VERS Encapsulated Objects (VEOs). 

PROV recommends that these formats are used to preserve temporary value records for long periods, ensuring the records’ accessibility for their entire retention period.

About the new Specifications

New Specifications have been issued to assist software developers build systems and tools which will produce Version 3 VEOs. Permanent value digital records must be transferred to PROV as VEOs, at a time agreed between the agency and PROV. 

The new Specifications are:

• PROS 19/05 S4 Constructing VEOs Specification
• PROS 19/05 S5 Adding Metadata Packages to VEOs Specification

These Specifications supersede those created under the revoked PROS 15/03. However, the technical requirements have not been changed between the revoked and newly issued Specifications. 

See our VEO creation page for further information about VEOs.