Spreading the Word about JHOVE2: Tutorial Delivered in Salt Lake City, Rome

For the past two years the University of California Curation Center (UC3) has been partnering with Portico and Stanford on a project to develop JHOVE2, an open source format-aware characterization application and framework.  The goals of the project were to address a number of known deficiencies in design and implementation of the original JHOVE tool (such as API simplification, increased performance, and extensive customization options), as well as adding significant new features, such as the automatic recursive characterization of objects arbitrarily nested in containers (such as directories or Zip files), aggregate-level format identification of complex objects composed of multiple files (such as ESRI Shapefile), and rules-based assessment for determinations of acceptability.  (More information is available at (http://jhove2.org/).)

Following the initial production release in April and part of UC3’s ongoing outreach effort, JHOVE2 project staff presented a full day tutorial on JHOVE2 at the IS&T Archiving conference taking place in Salt Lake City the week of May 16, 2011.  Tutorial topics included a general introduction to characterization, background on the JHOVE2 project (goals, methodology, deliverables), new JHOVE2 concepts and architecture, installation and configuration, use of the assessment feature, APIs and module development, and community building and sustainability.  The tutorial attendees were highly engaged and included representatives from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), National Library of Medicine, National Library of Australia, National Library of New Zealand, and Ex Libris.

A similar workshop aimed at the European user community will be held the week of May 23 in Rome.  This four day workshop, co-sponsored by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (in the process of a large digital publishing initiative) and the Open Planets Foundation (an organization established to provide practical solutions and expertise in digital preservation, building on the research and development outputs of the Planets project), will offer an intensive introduction to digital preservation issues (the first two days) and hands-on use of JHOVE2 (the second two days).