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Prometheus Users Guide DRAFT v1.3.5.pdf
version: 1.3.5

Prometheus - Digital Preservation Workbench Reference Guide (print)

On-line Prometheus User Help

Prometheus - Digital Preservation Workbench Reference Guide (web)

Click here to see this demonstration video     (3 Mb.download requiring an Adobe Flash Player for viewing)  

 

 

 

Prometheus Jukebox Specification and Component Installation Guide.pdf
version: 1.0

In response to a number of enquires, we have added the specification and installation document for our custom configured mini-jukeboxes to the Downloads section. It can be accessed via the above link to the Downloads page.

We custom built Prometheus around the standard operating environment found on the workstations in the NLA. There are also a number of existing internal web services which we also utilise. These include:

1) The NLA web service for user and management access (single sign-on)

2) The NLA web ingest service to DOSS (our mass digital object storage system). Currently not include this version of the software.

3) The NLA web service which harvests the NLA Voyager Bibliographic Catalogue and Holdings

4) The NLA web service which harvests the NLA Rights Management System

 

Additional considerations:

1) You will have to build your own database. (however the schema is included in the source code)

2) The current user interface is not very flexible or expandable.

3) Copy protection and some encodings (such as videoCDs) have proved to be problematic.

3) It is designed for workstations running Windows XP using .net 3.5 and Java 1.6, upon which our socket service is installed.

4) Our processing server runs on Linux.

5) Anti virus checker utilises ClamAV - http://www.clamav.net/

 

Third party tools utilised within the File Analysis service, under open source licensing include:

1) DROID automatic file format identification tool - http://droid.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Introduction

2) New Zealand Metadata Extractor - http://meta-extractor.sourceforge.net/

3) JHOVE object validation environment – http://hul.harvard.edu/jhove/

4) ClamAV virus checking code implementation from National Archives of Australia’s XENA – http://xena.sourceforge.net/

5) Jaxsum Java checksum utility - http://sourceforge.net/projects/jacksum/

6) Digital Preservation’s drive info identification tool - http://getdriveinfo2.sourceforge.net/

 

The NLA is currently updating bugs and thus updating the code supplied on the Downloads page. We are also currently building version 2.0 (for release in Dec. 2008). This will include:

1) Reports

2) Meaningful error messages

3) Better CD and DVD detection functionality (we have problems with VideoCD and other problematic encodings)

4) Review of metadata capture

5) Bug fixing

6) Optimisation of the processing (some parts are slow)

7) Build in support of Asian character sets

Possibly in 2009 our IT section will work on version 3.0. This would enable the services and the frameworks which we have developed to eventually become a generic digital preservation ingest workflow for all digital content.

The reason we selected CDRDAO is that it generates a raw, bit level image of the entire CD-ROM, whereas dd (on windows, at least) only generates an image of the file system which is visible to the operating system. So, to provide and example, if we are dealing with a Hybrid CD-ROM (that is, a CD-ROM which contains both an ISO-9660 part, and a HFS part), dd will only make an image of the ISO-9660 part, as that is only portion of the CD-ROM which is visible in Windows. CDRDAO will also make accurate images of CD-DA (CDs that also have audio tracks), which we found was not necessarily the case with dd. In the case of DVDs, we use dd, both because CDRDAO doesn’t work reliably on DVDs, and also because the UDF file system is visible in its entirety through Windows.

 

Three additional points should be noted.

• Firstly, if this system were being developed for workstations using an operating system other than Windows, such as OS X or Linux, then it may have been possible to provide a solution that exclusively used dd for imaging.

• Secondly, there is an issue with the 1.1 release (I believe also with 1.2?) where the program used to detect if a media was a CD-ROM or a DVD was not always reliable, which led to some read errors. A newer version of this program should be bundled with the next release, in which these issues are solved.

• Lastly, we are looking at, in the long term, writing a program that will extract the data from both CD-ROMs and DVDs (not to mention next generation media such as BluRay) in a more accessible fashion than CDRDAO (this would allow us to move away from using the CDRDAO, toc2cue, and bchunk trinity of programs for extracting CD-ROM data). At this point, it is something we'd like to do, but constraints in time and resources mean that it's not possible for me to say when work on this program would commence.

Software Requirements

1. Java 1.5 jdk.

2. setup Tomcat 6.XX, tomcat should have suffcient privileges to run mount and umount commands

3. ClamAv 0.93, installation instructions could be found on wiki

4. Mount /doss-devel/working/digipres for dev environment

5. Resolve library hosts to ip addresses

6. Open TCP port 61616 for devel server required for the Apache ActiveMQ

Some software:

• bchunk 1.2.0 - http://he.fi/bchunk/

• toc2cue - this is a part of cdrdao - http://cdrdao.sourceforge.net/

• disktype

• The system should at least support following file systems

• iso9660, ext3, vfat, hfs, hfsplus, udf

• udd 2.0 file system is currently not supported