Pre-emptive Pre-Ingest

PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

April 1, 2026

Artefactual Systems Introduces Pre-Emptive Ingest Workflow for Enduro: Preserve Your Content Before It Exists

Surrey, BC - April 1, 2026

Artefactual Systems today announced a new automated workflow for Enduro, its open source digital preservation pipeline, that extends the SUPERPRESERVATION™ framework to address one of digital preservation's most persistent challenges: format obsolescence. The Pre-Emptive Ingest Workflow eliminates obsolescence risk at source by ingesting content before it is created.

"Format migration has always been a reactive discipline," said Justin Simpson, Managing Director of Artefactual Systems. "We normalize to preservation formats after the fact, responding to obsolescence that has already occurred. Pre-Emptive Ingest inverts this entirely. By the time your content exists, it has already been preserved."

The workflow leverages Enduro's existing pipeline architecture to trigger ingest events upstream of content creation. Submission Information Packages are optional. In pilot deployments, several participating institutions reported that a meaningful portion of their pre-emptively ingested content had not yet been determined to exist, which the project team described as consistent with expectations.

Technical specifications for the Pre-Emptive Ingest Workflow include:

• AIP generation prior to SIP submission

• Fixity checking against checksums of anticipated content

• Designated community defined prospectively

• Retention schedules measured from a point prior to acquisition

• Disposition actions triggered by events that have not yet occurred

"This feels right to me," said Kelly Stewart, Chief Archivist at Artefactual Systems. "In preservation we are always trying to get ahead of the problem. Pre-Emptive Ingest is that instinct taken to its conclusion. You begin before you know exactly what you are making. The oven is already on. The butter is already softened. What the thing ultimately becomes is almost secondary to the fact that you started."

The Pre-Emptive Ingest Workflow for Enduro is available immediately as an experimental feature. Artefactual Systems notes that documentation for the workflow was pre-emptively archived in SUPERPRESERVATION™ at the time of development and is therefore inaccessible.

About Enduro

Enduro is an open source, cloud-native digital preservation pipeline developed by Artefactual Systems. It is designed to process transfers at scale with minimal human intervention. It does not currently support cake as a recognised content type, though this is under review pending a formal proposal from the Chief Archivist.

About Artefactual Systems

Artefactual Systems is a commercial open source software company serving archivists, digital preservation professionals, records managers, and memory institutions worldwide. Its products include Archivematica, AtoM (Access to Memory), and Enduro.

Contact: press@artefactual.com

All product names are trademarks of Artefactual Systems, Inc. SUPERPRESERVATION™ preservation integrity guarantees are valid only in the absence of observation. Artefactual Systems accepts no liability for content that exists, does not exist, or exists in superposition.