Open Planets Foundation

Digital Preservation is making certain progress in terms of tool development, progressive establishment of standards and increasing activity in user communities, but there is a wide gap of approaches to systematically assess, compare and improve how organizations go about achieving their preservation goals.

The second year review of the FP7 Collaborative project SCAPE took place on April 18-19, 2013 at the AIT office in Vienna. As I have recently received the final written report of this review, I thought I would share some results with the preservation community.

As I have previously blogged, our community’s attempts to share knowledge and experience of digital preservation tools has been a triumph of good-willed enthusiam over coordination and collaboration.

The DROID software tool is developed by The National Archives (UK) to perform automated batch identification of file formats by assigning Pronom Unique Identifiers (PUIDs) and MIME types to files. The tool uses so called signature files as a basis of information stemming from the PRONOM technical registry.

I am here presenting some considerations for using the tool on the Hadoop platform together with a performance evaluation of the job execution on a Hadoop cluster using the publicly available Govdocs1 corpus data set.

Last year (2012) the KB released a report on the suitability of the EPUB format for archival preservation. A substantial number of EPUB-related developments have happened since then, and as a result some of the report’s findings and conclusions have become outdated.