FITS - The File Information Tool Set

Abstract

Preservation repositories include technical metadata for ingested files. The File Information Tool Set (FITS) is an open source tool that identifies, validates and extracts technical metadata for a wide range of file formats. It acts as a wrapper, invoking and managing the output from several other open source tools. Output from these tools are converted into a common format, compared to one another and consolidated into a single XML output file. FITS is written in Java and is compatible with Java 1.5 or higher. The external tools currently used are: JHOVE, Exiftool, National Library of New Zealand Metadata Extractor, DROID, FFIdent, and the unix File Utility.