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Operational notes Regulation

Digital Preservation Manual: June’s Deadline Has Passed, AgID’s Check Hasn’t

8 min read

Close-up of a hard drive read-write head suspended above the reflective metal platter of an opened disk drive, with the clamp screws ringing the central hub, black and white photograph
The head reads whatever the platter holds today; whether it is the same data from ten years ago is written on a different record, kept somewhere else.

June 2026 passed two months ago, and it is the month Italy’s three-year plan for public-administration IT, 2026 update, assigns to a single task: checking that every public body has published a Manuale di conservazione (preservation manual) and named a Responsabile della conservazione (preservation officer) in its «Amministrazione trasparente» (transparent administration) area. It is not a statutory deadline — an AgID planning document sets it — but its absence does not go unnoticed: the Agency is closing, by December, its monitoring of that target, while since January an internal working group has been rewriting the very rules that manual must follow, to align them with the new eIDAS 2. So public bodies are being checked against a text AgID itself is revising. And even where the manual and the officer are duly published, a problem remains that neither document solves on its own.

The rules in force, and who writes them

The Guidelines on the formation, management and preservation of digital documents are no ordinary act. The Digital Administration Code itself (Legislative Decree 82/2005), at Article 43(1) (text in force since 27 January 2018), points to them by name: «Gli obblighi di conservazione e di esibizione di documenti si intendono soddisfatti a tutti gli effetti di legge a mezzo di documenti informatici, se le relative procedure sono effettuate in modo tale da garantire la conformità ai documenti originali e sono conformi alle Linee guida» (duties met through digital documents whose procedures conform to the originals and to the Guidelines). Article 71 (in force since 27 January 2018) gives AgID the power to adopt those Guidelines: «Le Linee guida divengono efficaci dopo la loro pubblicazione nell’apposita area del sito Internet istituzionale dell’AgID e di essa ne è data notizia nella Gazzetta Ufficiale della Repubblica italiana» (they take effect after publication on AgID’s website, with notice in the Official Gazette). Today’s version is the text adopted by AgID Determination 371/2021 of 17 May 2021, applicable since 1 January 2022. Alongside it sits a second, lesser-known act: the Regulation on preservation-service providers, adopted by AgID Determination 455/2021 of 25 June 2021 under Article 34(1-bis)(b) of the Code (in force since 17 July 2020) — the paragraph letting a public body keep its documents, under letter a), «all’interno della propria struttura organizzativa» (in-house), or, under letter b), «affidandola, in modo totale o parziale, […] ad altri soggetti, pubblici o privati» (outsourced, wholly or in part, to other bodies, public or private) that meet the requirements set precisely by those Guidelines and that Regulation. The Code, at Article 44(1-ter) (in force since 17 July 2020), sums up the goal in five words: a preservation system must guarantee «caratteristiche di autenticità, integrità, affidabilità, leggibilità, reperibilità» (authenticity, integrity, reliability, readability, retrievability).

A target the Plan sets, not the law

The Code does not say when a body must have its manual ready: the deadline is administrative, and AgID writes it into the three-year Plan, under objective 3.3. The document sets two targets in sequence. For 2025: «Il 100% delle amministrazioni devono avere adottato il Manuale di gestione documentale, nominato il Responsabile della gestione documentale per ciascuna Area Organizzativa Omogenea (AOO)» (100% must have adopted the document-management manual and named an officer per Organisational Area). For 2026, the same target shifts to preservation: «Il 100% delle amministrazioni devono avere adottato il Manuale di conservazione e nominato il Responsabile della conservazione» (100% must have adopted the preservation manual and named the preservation officer). Both acts must be published in a dedicated section of every body’s «Amministrazione trasparente» (transparent administration) area — not unlike how another AgID deadline this year comes from a plan rather than a primary statute. The operating calendar is just as precise: by June 2026 bodies had to verify the publication was real; by December AgID completes — for the second time, after 2025’s document-management round — its own monitoring of the preservation target. We are inside the window where that check closes.

The same rules, already under revision

On 19 January 2026 AgID adopted Director-General Determination 11/2026, establishing «un Gruppo di lavoro che provveda all’aggiornamento delle Linee guida per la formazione, gestione e conservazione dei documenti informatici e del Regolamento sui criteri per la fornitura dei servizi di conservazione dei documenti informatici» (a working group to update both the Guidelines and the Regulation) — the same two acts just described, not one. The reasoning sits in one of the act’s recitals: «RITENUTO necessario armonizzare le disposizioni presenti nel Regolamento (UE) 2024/1183 del Parlamento Europeo e del Consiglio, che modifica il Regolamento (UE) n.910/2014 (Reg. eIDAS), alle disposizioni normative di AgID in tema di gestione documentale e conservazione» (having deemed it necessary to align Regulation 2024/1183, which amends eIDAS, with AgID’s own preservation rules). In other words: eIDAS 2 has already changed the European rules on qualified trust services — signature, seal, time-stamping — and Italy’s preservation rules, frozen since 2021, have not caught up. The group, ten people internal to the Agency and coordinated by the head of its Qualification, Regulation, Identity and Digital Wallet area, carries no stated deadline. The act also sets the terms: participation is unpaid, and the coordinator may call in outside experts and interested parties at any stage. Ten internal staff, no cost, no deadline. Even the two milestones carry their own codes: CAP3.PA.18 for June’s check by the bodies, CAP3.31 for December’s monitoring by the Agency. Until it concludes, the manual every body was due to publish by June still follows the 2021 text — the one AgID, since January, has judged in need of correction.

The one piece the manual does not prove

A published manual and a named officer answer an organisational question: the body has a preservation system, and someone is accountable. They do not answer the one asked document by document: for a file submitted ten years ago, can anyone still show it is intact and readable? The Guidelines split that proof across different systems. The producer submits a pacchetto di versamento (submission package); the preservation system generates a submission report, which the Guidelines describe as «contenente un riferimento temporale, specificato con riferimento al Tempo universale coordinato (UTC), e una o più impronte, calcolate sull’intero contenuto del pacchetto di versamento» (carrying a UTC timestamp and one or more hash values computed over the whole package). From there comes an archival package: the Guidelines describe «la preparazione, la sottoscrizione con firma digitale o firma elettronica - qualificata o avanzata - del responsabile della conservazione […] o con il sigillo elettronico - qualificato o avanzato – apposto dal conservatore esterno, nonché la gestione del pacchetto di archiviazione sulla base delle specifiche della struttura dati indicate dallo standard UNI 11386» (signed by the preservation officer or sealed by the external provider, to the UNI 11386 standard). Among the officer’s duties, the Guidelines require that they «effettua la verifica periodica, con cadenza non superiore ai cinque anni, dell’integrità e della leggibilità dei documenti informatici e delle aggregazioni documentarie degli archivi» (carry out a periodic check, at least every five years, of integrity and readability) — two checks in a decade, not one. If the service is outsourced, the proof shifts again — into the contract, and into the provider’s manual, referenced but not folded into the body’s. None of these systems — archive, provider portal, access log — answers on its own the one question that matters: which documents are actually inside a validated package today, not merely filed away somewhere, still waiting to be.

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The two axes, applied to preservation

Compliance. The question “is the manual published?” becomes, in our system, a package-by-package check: which documents passed through a signed submission report, which archival packages still carry a verifiable signature or seal, which were checked in the last five years for integrity and readability. Not a one-off attestation, but an up-to-date map of every preserved object — checked against the Guidelines in force at the time, even when, as now, that text is under revision.

Decision-making. The same system holds document management, the preservation system and access logs together in a single operating model, on which AI agents execute decisions with a human operator in command. Always on-premises, on autonomous machines without deep integration into the client’s network, or on our dedicated cloud, with a dedicated VPN and a data centre in Italy. It is the method behind how we build the platform.

Could you say today, for a package submitted to preservation three years ago, who signed it, when it was last verified, and whether the provider it was entrusted to still meets the rules in force? Half an hour with one of our experts is enough for the first map.

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