From the Digital Preservation Coalition website:
The National Archives is proposing to launch a new phase of development of its DROID tool, and is seeking to engage with various user groups and stakeholders from the digital preservation community, government and the wider archives sector communities to help inform and discuss potential developments and user needs. As part of this process, The National Archives, in conjunction with the Digital Preservation Coalition, invites interested parties to attend a one day workshop, hosted at Kew, to discuss their experiences of using DROID and PRONOM in their respective disciplines, discuss how the tools fit their use case, and describe both positive and negative experiences of the tools and their interaction with The National Archives.
The conference will be at the National Archives in Kew, London, on November 28. Registration is free for DPC members and associates and cheap for everyone else.
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Tagged conferences, Droid, software
JHOVE2 2.0.0 has been released. Supported formats are ICC Color Profile, SGML, Shapefile, TIFF, UTF-8, WAVE, and XML. The first three of these aren’t supported by the old JHOVE. There’s also a Zip module which validates files within a Zip repository, but not the Zip file itself. JHOVE2 can be downloaded in Zip or Gzip form, or from the Mercurial repository.
Congratulations to everyone who worked on this project!
Forwarded from Stephen Abrams:
The JHOVE2 project team will be presenting a one day tutorial on the use of JHOVE2 at the IS&T Archiving conference on May 16.
http://www.imaging.org/ist/conferences/archiving/index.cfm
JHOVE2 is an open source framework and application for next generation format-aware characterization of digital objects. Characterization is the process of deriving representation information about a formatted digital object that is indicative of its significant nature and useful for purposes of classification, analysis, and use in digital curation, preservation, and repository contexts. JHOVE2 builds on the success of the original JHOVE characterization tool by addressing known limitations and offering significant new functions, including: object-focused, rather than file-focused, characterization; signature-based file level identification using DROID; aggregate-level identification based on configurable file system naming conventions; rules-based assessment to support determinations of object acceptability in addition to validation conformity; and extensive user configuration options.
The 2011 release of JHOVE2 represents the availability of a significant new tool for digital preservation; this course will provide a broad overview of JHOVE2, as well as detailed information on its functionality, architecture, use in local workflows, and open source community.
This short course will give attendees both a broad conceptual overview and detailed information on JHOVE2, and equip them to use the open source tool in their local environments. Specifically, the course will:
This course is designed for technologists and practitioners (developers, managers, analysts and administrators) engaged in digital curation, preservation, and repository activities, and whose work is dependent on an understanding of the format and pertinent characteristics of digital assets.
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Because of security issues at SourceForge, all CVS repositories, including the one for JHOVE, were down for a week or so. They’re back up now. SourceForge provides details here.
CVS is getting to be ancient technology, so I may migrate the repository to Subversion at some point.
There is a poll online for letting the developers of JHOVE2 know what plans you have for it. It just takes a couple of minutes to fill out and doesn’t even require Javascript.
Files that Last: Digital Preservation for Everygeek, an e-book to bring the message of digital preservation to the broader geek world.
Mad File Format Science 
Anyone for Bridge?
If you’ve worked with image metadata in Photoshop, you’ve run into the problem that to save changes to the metadata, you have to save the image. With a lossy JPEG, this can mean image deterioration each time you save it.
Today, while working on a bunch of pictures from my trip to Prague, I learned about the Bridge application, which comes with Adobe Creative Suite. If you’re a really serious Photoshop user, you probably already know about Bridge, so you can skip the rest of this post. But for those who don’t, it’s an application which brings up a desktop-like interface with your directories. With the icon for any image file selected, you can choose File > Get Info from the menu and get the same file information dialog you’d get in Photoshop, including completion options from entries you’ve previously made in Photoshop. Make your changes and click OK, and they’ll appear when you open the file in Photoshop or export metadata from the file — without any change to the image data.
Better still, you can select multiple images and edit their metadata in one operation. For instance, you can set the author and copyright for all the files in a directory at once, without disturbing the other information. This is a huge improvement over editing each file’s metadata separately in Photoshop.
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Tagged Adobe, metadata, Photoshop, software