Blogs: DROID

Course Overview If you have a digital preservation strategy that involves digital files, you’ll know how important it is to understand the file formats in which your data is encoded. To do this comprehensively involves at least three main operations: identifying the format, characterising the format, and validating the format. To put it another way, […]

BACKGROUND Nearly two and a half years ago, I started an effort for Apache Tika™ to help improve its robustness via TIKA-1302.  Apache Tika™ is an umbrella/wrapper project that “detects and extracts metadata and text from over a thousand different file types (such as PPT, XLS, and PDF).” I documented some of the early work […]

This is a relatively long post, so to summarise before delving into the details: We’re exploring Wikidata, the (relatively new) Wikipedia for data, as a knowledge base for digital preservation information and would appreciate feedback and involvement. At Yale University Library we are beginning a new programme of work (with funding from both CLIR and […]

Inspired by Jenny Micham’s blog post about developing her first file format signature, I thought it would be fun to take a crack at creating one myself. I previously dipped my toe into the world of contributing to PRONOM by looking at a few mis-identifications and multi-identifications, but I had yet to create a file […]

At Archives New Zealand we were finding ‘WAVE’ files becoming a bottleneck of one of our ingest processes. The result initially looked odd to me where I had thought I had understood in the past that file format identification would not take longer to divine than a checksum. My rationale being that to identify a […]

Jenny Mitcham, Digital Archivist at the University of York started a nice snowball rolling last week when she asked “Research data – what does it really look like?” Paul Young at the National Archives, UK, was one of those to respond, to show that perhaps the snowball had been generating momentum for a number of […]

As promised yesterday this is the follow up blog to the refactor of my original DROID SQLite Analysis work. The new version now allows you to produce reports from the format identification tool Siegfried. In this blog I wanted to talk about a small number of other details that can be a bit harder to […]

With the release of the latest Siegfried there was added motivation for me to provide an analysis output for the format identification tool. With ‘double the magic’ there was a lot more for us to explore as analysts, and fingers crossed this release (a refactor) of my SQLite based analysis tool will help with that exploration. Previous […]

This is the second blog inspired by my visit to colleagues at National Library of Australia, last August. The first, discusses a federated approach to better incorporating custom signatures into the PRONOM signature base without modifying PRONOM. The essence of the blog, however, still centers around how the community can create signatures for itself, and […]

Presented here is a tool that will create a 'rogues gallery' out of any digital collection for which you have a DROID report for (alternatively, soon, a Siegfried report for). The tool was presented at a recent OPF Webinar, Preservation in Practice: Archives New Zealand; slides here. And was created by myself and Andrea K. […]