An important step in digital preservation is having full visibility of content and the various formats held within a digital preservation repository, so that appropriate preservation actions can be planned and carried out. Compression formats, such as ZIP files, can be an obstacle when running file format identification and validation processes. This is especially the case when compressed files are nested within preservation packages.

This paper outlines a process implemented by the University of Melbourne’s Digital Preservation Program to unpack ZIP files within Archival Information Packages in a digital preservation system and attach supporting PREMIS metadata.

Video DVD is a very popular media to disseminate videos, offering a variety of challenges that needs to be addressed in order to be properly preserved. This paper examines the efforts of the National Library of France to ingest, preserve and give access to its entire DVD collection. It shows that among the multiple choices the best ones are often oriented by the community.

This study examines the role of technical metadata in the preservation and analysis of born-digital literary archives, focusing on the collections of contemporary Italian authors Silvia Avallone and Paolo Di Paolo housed at the Centro Manoscritti of the University of Pavia. Through the Digital Preservation Workflow (DPW) software developed within the Pavia Archivi Digitali (PAD) project, the research investigates how automatically extracted metadata can enhance understanding of digital documents across temporal, authorial, and textual dimensions.

The methodology combines forensic techniques with archival approaches, employing both Apache Tika and ExifTool to extract and interpret technical metadata. The comparative analysis reveals significant inconsistencies between filesystem metadata and embedded document properties, highlighting how creation dates, editing times, and authorship information require careful contextual interpretation.

Key findings include the discovery of systematic discrepancies in temporal metadata due to time zone normalization, the identification of complex authorial networks through creator fields, and insights into compositional practices through editing time and revision counts. The study also addresses the challenges in interpreting ambiguous metadata fields, particularly in legacy document formats.

This investigation establishes technical metadata as a valuable resource for both archival description and philological inquiry, capable of reconstructing creative processes and documenting authorial behaviors. However, it simultaneously emphasizes the necessity for interdisciplinary approaches that combine archival science, philology, and computational methods to effectively preserve and interpret contemporary literary heritage in digital formats.

Many French archival services use persistent identifiers to facilitate access to archives. However, few studies have addressed the sustainability of these identifiers. This can raise questions when these identifiers are employed to identify digital archives preserved in digital repositories.
The Vitam program, which develops the Vitam digital recordkeeping software on behalf of the French government, carried out a study in collaboration with the Vitam user community in 2021. The goal was to improve knowledge of the use of persistent identifiers, particularly ARK identifiers, as well as their lifecycle and the requirements regarding their sustainability. The study also aimed to define the features required in the Vitam software to guarantee a long-term preservation of this type of identifier, whatever happens. Finally, it also made sure that their use could be adapted to different user contexts.