Tools Explore our open source digital preservation toolset
OPF maintains a number of open source digital preservation tools that address common digital preservation challenges. Together, they form a reference toolset for digital preservation which can be adapted for use in different organisational workflows. Our current tools are mainly used in the pre-ingest and ingest stages of preservation, but our toolset is constantly evolving in response to the needs of our members.
Our tools are widely adopted by the community, and can be used as stand-alone tools, as part of a bespoke digital preservation workflow, or can be found embedded in several leading commercial solutions.
As an experienced leader in open source development, we believe that making our tools available under open source licences helps to support their long term sustainability. Not only does this approach help people to better understand the software they are using and adapt it to their requirements, it helps to ensure that our tools are thoroughly tested by a community of practitioners.
The tools in our reference toolset are mature and ready for use in production environments and workflows. To learn more about our participation in research and development projects, take a look at what we’re working on.
If you use our tools, please consider becoming an OPF member or making a donation to support our work.
Our tools
The tools below are the core components of our reference toolset which are maintained under our product release cycle. We also provide hosting for prototypes (which you can explore on GitHub) and participate in selected research and development projects.
A format identification, validation, and characterisation tool
An industry supported PDF/A validator
A command-line tool for file format identification
A validator and feature extractor for JP2 images
Our product release cycle
Every product in the OPF reference toolset undergoes a regular triage session where the OPF team and tool maintainers meet to review the list of issues raised on GitHub. During this process, each issue is categorised as a bug or feature, assigned a priority level, and given an estimated number of development days. Together, we agree a set of work and associated milestones for the upcoming releases and present them to our product board for review and approval at the next meeting.
This process is designed to help users plan for adopting new software updates into their workflow as well as identify priorities for contributors or for our community hackathons.
Release schedule
Typically, we aim for one new release of each product per calendar year. Our provisional release schedule for the current year is below.
| Product | Version | Date of release candidate |
|---|---|---|
| JHOVE | 1.30 | Quarter 4 2023 |
| veraPDF | 2.2 2.4 | Quarter 2 2023 Quarter 4 2023 |
| Fido | 1.8 | Quarter 3 2023 |
| Jpylyzer | 2.2 | Quarter 4 2023 |