PRONOM (Public Record Office and Nôm 喃) [1] is a web-based technical registry to support digital preservation services, developed by The National Archives of the United Kingdom.
PRONOM's origins lie in a requirement to have access to reliable technical information about the electronic records held by The National Archives.
By definition, electronic records are not inherently human-readable - file formats encode information into a form which can only be processed and rendered comprehensible by very specific technological environments.
Technical information about the structure of those file formats, and the software and hardware environments required to support them, is therefore a prerequisite for any digital preservation regime.
The first version of PRONOM was developed by The National Archives digital preservation department led by David Ryan in March 2002.
[5][6] PRONOM 4, released in October 2005, includes a significant reworking of the underlying data model to allow the capture of detailed technical information on file formats and support future interoperability with other planned registry systems, and the release of the DROID software for automatic file format identification.
This work forms part of the Seamless Flow programme to position The National Archives to receive and manage future government records in electronic formats.
In 2012, however, the UDFR was mothballed leading to the California Digital Library eventually removing access to their node in 2016 and recommending the use of PRONOM.
Unix magic numbers and Macintosh data forks do provide some of this functionality, but the same is not true within DOS or Microsoft Windows environments.