Tools
FITS (File Information Tool Set)
FITS identifies, validates, and extracts technical metadata for various file formats. It wraps multiple third-party open source tools (JHOVE, Exiftool, National Library of New Zealand Metadata Extractor, DROID, FFIdent, and the File Utility), normalizes and consolidates their output, and reports any errors.
JHOVE (JSTOR/Harvard Object Validation Environment)
An extensive technical description of the formal characteristics of a digital resource is a necessary precursor to preservation planning for or intervention on that resource. These characteristics are highly dependent upon the format used to represent the resource's abstract content. With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, LDI staff collaborated with the JSTOR Electronic-Archiving Initiative (now known as Portico) to produce an extensible tool, called JHOVE (the JSTOR/Harvard Object Validation Environment, pronounced "jove"), for automating format-specific identification, validation, and characterization of digital resources. Harvard and JSTOR have made this tool available to the wider community under an open source license, and it is widely deployed internationally. JHOVE has facilities to extract important technical characteristics of resources created in many commonly-used formats, such as AIFF and WAVE (audio); GIF, JPEG, JPEG 2000, and TIFF (still image); ASCII and UTF-8 (text); and PDF.
Harvard, in conjunction with Portico and Stanford University, has received a second round of funding from the Library of Congress under its National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP) to continue the development of JHOVE with significant extensions in functional capability and supported formats.