WIREDGOV

Digital Record Object Identification, or DROID, is free software we've developed that helps archives with their digital preservation workflows. We've now added a new feature to it: customisable export templates, that aid in cataloguing digital files or preparing them for processing.

What is DROID?

DROID is an important tool in the toolbox of all digital archivists. It is an open-source software application used by thousands of archives to support their digital preservation workflows.

It allows large volumes of files to be characterised, which means to determine the precise format of each digital file, in order to help archivists manage risks to long-term readability. In archival science, digital characterisation includes identifying file formats, extracting metadata (eg technical specifications, creation date), and assessing the risk of file format obsolescence.

It also captures important technical parameters, including creating checksums in a variety of formats, to help enable trust in the end-to-end integrity of digital records. A checksum is a unique, fixed-length string of alphanumeric characters (a 'digital fingerprint') generated by running a file through an algorithm like SHA-256 or MD5. It is used to verify data integrity, ensuring a file has not been corrupted or altered during download, transfer, or storage.

DROID has an ability to export the captured technical parameters to a CSV file. This CSV is often used as the basis of the next step of a digital preservation workflow, for example sending information to an archival catalogue, publishing files on a website, or transferring them to external bodies for archiving.

The challenge

Although DROID has the ability to configure the columns that it exports, it is quite common for the downstream processes to have some constraints about what columns they may accept. A few common constraints are as follows:

• Need for additional columns, which are not directly available from DROID results in the CSV
• Specific column names for certain data
• Case (upper or lower) of the data in the columns
• Order of the columns within the exported CSV

Until now, users who wanted to get around these constraints addressed these issues by developing custom tools external to DROID. Such tools, typically, read the CSV file and rewrite it using desired transformations. These tools can introduce their own complexities such as:

• External dependency in a workflow
• Another tool to maintain
• Lack of support for new features / output formats added to DROID

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