No MSG file format identification by Droid in FITS?

[remco.van....@nationaalarchief.nl]

Dear all,

While analysing a collection of documents with (an out-of-the-box installation of) FITS (0.10.2), I noticed that there is no Droid file format identification output for MSG (.msg) files.

Tools that do run for file format identification of MSG files are the file utility ("Microsoft Word Document"), Exiftool ("FPX") and Tika ("Microsoft Outlook Message").

MSG files are not on a file extension exclusion list for Droid in FITS (in fits.xml), and Droid is listed (in fits.xml) before the three tools mentioned above.

Droid does run for e.g. DOC (.doc) and HTML (.htm).

I would like to know what Droid thinks of these MSG files, because Droid is our e-depot's standard file format identification tool.

Please note: I ran Droid (6.2.1) seperately and it recognises the MSG files as "Microsoft Outlook Email Message" with PUID "x-fmt/430".

I would like to continue using FITS and it's multiple tool analysis power, including Droid.

Any idea why there is no Droid output for MSG files?

Best regards,

Remco van Veenendaal

Preservation advisor

Dutch National Archives

[dne...@g.harvard.edu]

Hi,

FITS 0.10.2 uses DROID 6.1.5. As you point out, this version of DROID contained in FITS does not recognize MSG file. The next release of FITS will most likely not include an upgrade of the DROID tool. I'd like to suggest that you attempt upgrading the 0.10.2 version of FITS with DROID 6.2.1. As a start, replace all JAR files that come with the newer version of DROID within the FITS lib/droid directory. This will ensure isolation of all DROID functionality. It will likely be necessary to update files in the tools/droid directory. If this does not result in the desired results it still may be necessary to update code in FITS related to DROID: Droid.java, DroidQuery.java, and/or DroidToolOutputter.java.

We will take note to update to the latest version of DROID in a future release of FITS. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.

Sincerely,
The FITS development team

[dne...@g.harvard.edu]

Hello,

In the coming weeks there will be a FITS release that will incorporate an upgrade of DROID to v.6.3. It will also incorporate the latest signature file.
An announcement will be made to this group at that time.

Thanks,
David Neiman
Library Technology Services
Harvard University