prtea

Prtea is a compact, text-oriented archival format designed for long-term preservation of digital documents. It prioritizes portability, human readability, and resilience to data corruption, aiming to remain usable across hardware and software changes over decades.

Name and origins: prtea is an acronym for Preserved Text Encoding for Archival. The term was coined during collaborative discussions among librarians, archivists, and software developers seeking a simple, self-describing format.

Structure: A prtea file begins with a header containing metadata such as title, author, creation date, version, and a checksum. This header is followed by an ordered sequence of blocks. Each block has a type, a length, a payload, and optional metadata fields. The payload is stored as plain text when possible, with binary payloads encoded in a safe, ASCII-friendly form.

Features: prtea emphasizes self-description, forward and backward compatibility, and straightforward parsing. It supports metadata extensibility, checksum verification, and optional compression. The format avoids complex syntax, facilitating tamper-evident integrity checks and easy recovery from partial data loss.

Usage and status: Prtea has been explored in library science and digital preservation projects as a demonstrator format rather than a widely adopted standard. Implementations exist in reference tooling and educational materials, but most institutions rely on established archival formats alongside prtea for interoperability.

See also: Text encoding, Digital preservation, Structured text formats.