Validate Your Content – the Online File Validator
Johan Kylander
The National Digital Preservation Services (DPS) in Finland preserve digital cultural heritage and research data. To be able to guarantee that ingested contents can be usable, the DPS has together with the utilizing partner organizations decided on a set of supported file formats. The files have to be valid, and both file format identification and validation are performed when ingesting the content to the DPS.

It is generally better to fix broken files as early as possible, as ingesting content to the DPS can occur at a later stage. To support partner organizations and foster digital content management expertise the DPS has published a public online file validator at: https://validation.digitalpreservation.fi/#/en

The user can upload files to the validator, which performs file format identification, technical metadata extraction and validation on the file. The validator also reports file format support in our DPS. The user can download a detailed validation report, including all collected metadata, in a JSON format.

The validator uses the same validation tools as our DPS ingest. The tool is a Python tool developed in-house called file-scraper: https://github.com/Digital-Preservation-Finland/file-scraper. File-scraper is a framework that uses several third-party and in-house tools, such as Open Preservation Foundation tools JHOVE, Fido, veraPDF and Jpylyzer, and various others, such as XmlLint, ExifTool, ImageMagick, FFmpeg, for identifying formats, collecting metadata, and validating. File-scraper detects the file-format and collects metadata based on a pre-set of tools called detectors. After, another set of tools is selected as validators based on the detected file format. Different file formats are thus validated using a different set of tools, and many formats are validated using several tools. For example, PDF/A is validated by JHOVE, veraPDF and Ghostscript, while WAVE is validated using JHOVE and FFmpeg. The metadata from all used tools, the well-formedness, and support in the DPS is harmonized into a JSON output.

The validator has been helpful in fostering digital content management and helping organizations perform digital preservation actions early on in the life cycle of the contents. This validator is helpful in ensuring the preservation of digital content and lowering the threshold of the ingest process.
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