Thursday, October 04, 2007
DROID gets preservation award
The Digital Preservation Coalition has issued an award to the National Archives of the UK for DROID, a tool for identifying file formats based on digital signatures. It works in connection with the PRONOM registry.
My congratulations to the developers of DROID. I must admit, though, that my own experience with it has been problematic. Its Java source code is available for downloading, but I was unsuccessful in building it because of its many dependencies on third-party libraries, and I had no luck getting information on exactly how to surmount that problem. DROID would be much more useful if it were less painful to incorporate its functionality into applications. I have a certain feeling that allowing this runs contrary to the developers' intent.
I think David had some interesting encounters with DROID (and JHOVE) when integrating them with AONS II. He hasn't mentioned much detail on the AONS II development wiki, but I know he did get both working. You can try out the AONS software if you'd like to - it's now available on SourceForge. Your feedback would be greatly valued. I'll be over to visit in November, so we could have a brief chat about it then.
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