Demystify-lite is upgraded and demystify 2.0.0 is finally here!
Demystify-lite and Demystify 2.0.0 have been released featuring the denylist for the first time, plus some bonus features!
With thanks to sponsorship from Archives New Zealand I have been able to add full denylist capabilities to demystify-lite; upgrade the tool’s dependencies; provide mechanisms for branding; and add format type classification output based on new features recently added to PRONOM and exposed through Siegfried.
Demystify and demystify-lite provide static analysis of file format reports generated from tools like DROID and Siegfried. The benefits of analyzing reports like these are described in my Code4Lib paper Fractal in Detail: What information is in a file format identification report. Demystify-lite makes it easy to run these analyses on your own web-browser via client-side technology which means that once the tool is loaded into memory no data passes from the client back to the server providing assurances no one is peeking at your data.
The denylist feature now offered by demystify-lite adds to its already extensive analyses and provides users a way to highlight information for those receiving the report to then consider when performing further appraisal on a digital collection, for example, highlighting known file names that might not be desirable in an accession or at the very least warrants further investigation before being accepted.
It was nice to be able to upgrade the dependencies of the project and introduce branding too that means other projects can fork demystify-lite and add their own logos so that they can incorporate it into their accessioning workflows and share demystify-lite with agencies and donors.
Demystify 2.0.0 wraps a number of changes including the file type classification work and improving how demystify-lite can import it as a dependency and interact with it.
A small bonus of being able to complete this feature request for Archives New Zealand was that I was able to expose the file type classification work I worked on for Siegfried based on suggestions from Robin François of Docuteam Switzerland.
Users can now get a frequency graph showing the range and frequency of different format types that appear in a collection scanned by DROID/Siegfried.
You can start using demystify-lite today if you have reports generated by DROID or Siegfried by accessing the URL hosted on my GitHub pages:
For those who are interested to work with demystify on the command line:
And please feel free to checkout their respective code repositories if you want to develop the code or provide feedback and suggestions via GitHub issues.
I appreciate Archives New Zealand reaching out and giving me the opportunity to improve this utility. With their investment in open source technology others across the community can benefit and make use of the same improvements. I hope other organisations will follow their example and provide much needed support for developers on other projects that are important to the digital preservation ecosystem.
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