The National Archives of Australia, as the archives and records authority for the Government of Australia, has a requirement to ensure that high value digital records created through the business activity of Australian Government agencies are accessible indefinitely. However, indefinite preservation is extremely difficult when dealing with digital records encoded in proprietary data formats.Over the last three years the National Archives of Australia has been developing an in-house digital preservation program built around the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and open source software. This approach focuses on archival data formats as the key to ensuring long-term accessibility of ‘born digital’ records. To achieve its preservation objectives the National Archives is developing or adopting a range of open data formats in XML which will be used as schema to transform original digital objects into XML data formats. To support the transformation process the National Archives is developing a software application, known as ‘Xena’, which will carry out the transformation process, which we call ‘normalisation’, and will also be able to render the XML data format into a viewable ‘performance’ of the original digital object, when required by researchers.The paper will describe the software application being developed and tested by the National Archives.