Tuesday, November 11, 2008

JHOVE2 project underway

From: stephen.abrams@ucop.edu [mailto:stephen.abrams@ucop.edu]
Sent: Thursday, November 06, 2008 3:43 PM
JHOVE2 project underway

The open source JHOVE characterization tool has proven to be an important
component of many digital repository and preservation workflows. However, its
widespread use over the past four years has revealed a number of limitations
imposed by idiosyncrasies of design and implementation. The California Digital
Library (CDL), Portico, and Stanford University have received funding from the
Library of Congress, under its National Digital Information Infrastructure
Preservation Program (NDIIPP) initiative, to collaborate on a two-year project
to develop a next-generation JHOVE2 architecture for format-aware
characterization.

Among the enhancements planned for JHOVE2 are:

* Support for four specific aspects of characterization: signature-based
identification, feature extraction, validation, and rules-based assessment
* A more sophisticated data model supporting complex multi-file objects and
arbitrarily-nested container objects
* Streamlined APIs to facilitate the integration of JHOVE2 technology in
systems, services, and workflows
* Increased performance
* Standardized error handling
* A generic plug-in mechanism supporting stateful multi-module processing;
* Availability under the BSD open source license

To help focus project activities we have recruited a distinguished advisory
board to represent the interests of the larger stakeholder community. The board
includes participants from the following international memory institutions,
projects, and vendors:

* Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (DNB)
* Ex Libris
* Fedora Commons
* Florida Center for Library Automation (FCLA)
* Harvard University / GDFR
* Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB)
* MIT / DSpace
* National Archives (TNA)
* National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)
* National Library of Australia (NLA)
* National Library of New Zealand (NLNZ)
* Planets project

The project partners are currently engaged in a public needs assessment and
requirements gathering phase. A provisional set of use cases and functional
requirements has already been reviewed by the JHOVE2 advisory board.

The JHOVE2 team welcomes input from the preservation community, and would
appreciate feedback on the functional requirements and any interesting test
data that have emerged from experience with the current JHOVE tool.

The functional requirements, along with other project information, is available
on the JHOVE2 project wiki
<http://confluence.ucop.edu/display/JHOVE2Info/Home>. Feedback on project goals
and deliverables can be submitted through the JHOVE2 public mailing lists.

To subscribe to the JHOVE2-TechTalk-L mailing list, intended for in-depth
discussion of substantive issues, please send an email to <listserv at ucop dot
edu> with an empty subject line and a message stating:

SUB JHOVE2-TECHTALK-L Your Name

Likewise, to subscribe to the JHOVE2-Announce-L mailing list, intended for
announcements of general interest to the JHOVE2 community, please send an email
to <listserv at ucop dot edu> with an empty subject line and a message stating:


SUB JHOVE2-ANNOUNCE-L Your Name

To begin our public outreach, team members recently presented a summary of
project activities at the iPRES 2008 conference in London, entitled "What? So
What? The Next-Generation JHOVE2 Architecture for Format-Aware
Characterization," reflecting our view of characterization as encompassing both
intrinsic properties and extrinsic assessments of digital objects.

Through the sponsorship of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek and the British Library,
we also held an invitational meeting on JHOVE2 following the iPRES conference
as a opportunity for a substantive discussion of the project with European
stakeholders.

A similar event, focused on a North American audience, will be held as a
Birds-of-a-Feather session at the upcoming DLF Fall Forum in Providence, Rhode
Island, on November 13. Participants at this event are asked to review closely
the functional requirements and other relevant materials available on the
project wiki at <http://confluence.ucop.edu/display/JHOVE2Info/Home> prior to
the session.

Future project progress will be documented periodically on the wiki.

Stephen Abrams, CDL
Evan Owens, Portico
Tom Cramer, Stanford University

on behalf of the JHOVE2 project team

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