OPF File Format Risk Registry

File Format Risks

• FoxPro
• JP2
  • Effects of bit and byte corruption
  • Files identified as JP2 are really JPX
  • Handling of ICC profiles
  • Image does not comply to technical profile
  • JPEG 2000 support discontinued in Photoshop Elements
  • Lack of performant open source decoding software
  • Not valid JP2
  • Resolution not in expected header fields
• JPX
  • Erroneous tile-part information in images created by Adobe Photoshop
  • Limited viewer and reader support of JPX
• MS Office, old Power Point Files (*.ppt)
• OpenDocument Text
  • Images not embedded because of paste as link bug in OpenOffice and LibreOffice
• Portable Document Format
  • Analysis of Acrobat Engineering PDFs with Acrobat Preflight and Apache Preflight
  • Encryption
  • File attachments
  • Fonts missing, damaged or incomplete
  • JavaScript
  • Multimedia content
  • Not valid PDF
  • References to external files
  • Summary of Apache Preflight errors
• QuickTake
• QuickTime Movie (*.mov, *.qt)
• Strand SSF

Registry scope

The File Format Risk Registry is focused on these four aspects:

• What are the main issues associated with this format?
• How does each issue affect long-term accessibility? What are the risks?
• For each issue, how can we assess whether a file object is affected, and using which tool(s)? How do we measure the risks?
• Are there any recommendations for dealing with an issue, or for mitigating its impact?

Relation to institutional policies

Institutions may have policies that define how the issues that are described in this registry are dealt with. In that case identified errors/risks need to be validated against the low-level institutional policy (control policy). There are a number of ways to achieve this. The following 2 blog posts present a straightforward approach that is based on Schematron rules:

• Automated assessment of JP2 against a technical profile
• Identification of PDF preservation risks: analysis of Govdocs selected corpus

Relation to other format registries

A number of format registries already exist, such as PRONOM, the ArchiveTeam File Formats Wiki and UDFR. Unlike those registries, the OPF FFRR focuses specifically on issues and risks, and how to deal with these in a practical way. So the information provided by FFRR should be seen as complementary to these more formal format registries. Being a Wiki, FFRR is also more free-form than PRONOM or UDFR. That aside, the very nature of its content isn't well suited to a more formalised database-centred approach.