•JHOVE – file analysis and
technical metadata creation
•“Digital
Formats: Factors for Sustainability, Functionality, and Quality”
•Fleischhauer and Arms, Library of
Congress
•Presented at DLF Fall Forum
2003
•
Two key developments
since original work on file assessment and development of questionnaire:
Carl Fleischhauer
and Caroline Arms of LC Office of Strategic Initiatives presented their
framework for evaluating formats under the title “Digital File Formats:
Factors for Sustainability, Functionality, and Quality”
And the tool known
as JHOVE was born.
Assume that many of
you are familiar with JHOVE’s capabilities; in the interest of time, I won’t
go into great detail. Suffice it to say,
It greatly
simplifies process of identifying formats and exposing technical
characteristics.
Fleischhauer and
Arms work was something of a revelation, because it effectively generalizes
and categorizes much of the information we were trying to capture, at a more
detailed file level, in our original questionnaire.
We built on this
work, adopting most of it, and developed a matrix for the analysis of
predominant formats. It is this matrix that now serves as the basis
underlying the SDR preservation assessment tool and associated format risk
policies. The tool is encoded in XML and implemented in a program written in
JAVA which is used during repository ingestion to produce a Submission
Information Package.