Islandora FITS

Overview

A simple module to extend islandora solution pack install processes by adding technical metadata extraction via the File Information Tool Set (FITS).

Behind the scenes, the module tries to get as much metadata as possible from your file by running:

fits.sh -i infile -xc -o outfile

The -xc command can sometimes cause problems, so if that fails, the module tries:

fits.sh -i infile -x -o outfile

Should that fail, technical metadata extraction is aborted and the error is logged in the watchdog (see Chapter 14 - Troubleshooting).

An error my be produced and logged in the apache error.log file even if TECHMD DS extraction is successfull, as the first attempt may fail and log an error while subsequent attempts may succeed.

The most common error printed out to the error.log file that is safe to ignore is as follows: "Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException at edu.harvard.hul.ois.fits.FitsOutput.addStandardCombinedFormat(FitsOutput.java:310) at edu.harvard.hul.ois.fits.Fits.outputStandardCombinedFormat(Fits.java:294) at edu.harvard.hul.ois.fits.Fits.outputResults(Fits.java:275) at edu.harvard.hul.ois.fits.Fits.main(Fits.java:186) Error: output cannot be converted to a standard schema format for this file"

Watchdog will be updated when TECHMD DS fail's to generate.

Tutorials

Install and Configure FITS

Dependencies

The File Information Tool Set (http://code.google.com/p/fits/).

Installation

Download and unzip the fits tool which can be found at http://code.google.com/p/fits/ (you don't need the extras.zip just the latest version of fits-X.Y.Z.zip). Make sure to unzip it into a location where the apache user can get access. Navigate to the unpacked fits folder and add executable permissions to fits.sh so the apache user can run the script. Clone this module into your drupal modules folder and enable it in drupal to activate automatic technical metadata extraction.

Configuration

Navigate to http://yourhostname/#overlay=admin/islandora/tools/fits. Here you can specify the location of the fits script (on the file system) and the dsid you want to use for the technical metadata datastream.

The System path to fits processor must include "fits.sh", so it would look like: "/usr/share/fits-0.6.1/fits.sh" instead of "/usr/share/fits-0.6.1/".

Troubleshooting

If you run an ingest and you don't get any technical metadata, check to make sure the permissions on the fits folder and the fits.sh script are correct and the apache user can run the script.

Some images and audio files will cause problems during metadata extraction. These are not fatal errors, but appear to be formats the fits script can't understand. In these cases, you will get some error reporting in the technical metadata datastream that may help determine what happened.

FAQ

Q: I ingested an object but I didn't get any technical metadata, what happened?

A: Its most likely you forgot to update the permissions on the fits.sh script. If that is not the case, make sure your configuration points to the correct file.