Making a local copy of the config schema

If you make heavy use of JHOVE (checking thousands of files or more), it would really help if you can change the location of the JHOVE schema you are accessing. Each time you run JHOVE, it checks this schema location. For moderate use that's no big deal, but really heavy use can be a burden on HUL's server.

It's fairly easy to fix this:

1. Open your working jhove.conf file. Save a backup copy in case anything goes wrong!
2. Near the top you'll see something like:
   xsi:schemaLocation="http://hul.harvard.edu/ois/xml/ns/jhove/jhoveConfig
http://hul.harvard.edu/ois/xml/xsd/jhove/1.4/jhoveConfig.xsd"
   The exact location may be different if you're using an older version of JHOVE.
3. Open that URL, the one that ends in jhoveConfig.xsd, in your browser, then save a local copy of the file on your machine.
4. Use your browser to open the copy you just saved. You should now see a URL in your browser window that begins with "file://" and gives the location of your local schema file. If it doesn't end with "jhoveConfig.xsd" or the file doesn't look like XML, you probably saved or re-opened the wrong file.
5. Replace the URL in your config file with the local URL and save jhove.conf. (You made a backup, didn't you?)
6. To confirm that it's really using this schema file, you may want to introduce a deliberate XML error into the file (e.g., add "<garbagetag>" anywhere) to see that JHOVE complains when you start it. If it doesn't, the jhove.conf you edited may not be the one JHOVE is using.

Making this change should improve your JHOVE performance, since you won't have to access an outside URL every time JHOVE reads its configuration file, and HUL thanks you for helping to preserve our endangered bits.

For more information: jhove-support at hulmail.harvard.edu