*** Apologies for cross-posting ***

A new version of JHOVE (JSTOR/Harvard Object Validation Environment) is now
available at <http://hul.harvard.edu/jhove/>.  This is release 1.0 (beta 2)
of 2004-07-19.

This release incorporates a number of bug fixes, enhancements, and three
new modules:

- AIFF          AIFF 1.3, AIFF-C
- JPEG 2000     JP2 (ISO/IEC 15444-1), JPX (ISO/IEC 15444-2)
- WAVE  PCMWAVEFORMAT, WAVEFORMATEX, WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE, BWF 1.0 and 1.1
(EBU 3285)

Technical properties of audio formats are reported in the draft AES-X134,
Core Audio Metadata XML Definition, undergoing development by AES SC-06-06
Working Group on Audio Metadata.

The most significant enhancement is the ability to process multiple digital
objects with a single invocation of the JHOVE.  Note that this necessitated
an* incompatible* change to the JHOVE XML schema, jhove.xsd
<http://hul.harvard.edu/ois/xml/xsd/jhove/jhove.xsd>. Attempting to
validate JHOVE beta 1 XML output against this new schema will result in
failure.  The previous beta 1 schema is still available at
<http://hul.harvard.edu/ois/xml/xsd/jhove/jhove-1_0b1.xsd>.

These new features are in addition to the continued module support for the
following formats: ASCII, GIF, JPEG, PDF, TIFF, UTF-8 and XML.  Full
documentation on all JHOVE features and installation instructions and
release notes are available on the JHOVE website
<http://hul.harvard.edu/jhove/>.

Please note that this release of JHOVE is made under the terms of the GNU
Lesser General Public License (LGPL), not the GPL as was the first beta
version.  We hope that this change in the license terms will simplify and
encourage the integration of JHOVE functionality into other existing or
proposed digital library and repository infrastructure systems and workflows.

Scheduled enhancements to future releases of JHOVE include a module for
HTML, supporting HTML 2.0-4.01 and XHTML 1.0-1.1.

Dependent upon the comments received on this release, we anticipate this to
be the last BETA version; the first PRODUCTION release should occur later
in this calendar year.

Please direct all comments to <[log in to unmask]>.

JHOVE is a joint project of JSTOR and the Harvard University
Library.  Development of JHOVE was funded in part by the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation through a grant to JSTOR for its Electronic-Archiving Initiative.

---
Stephen L. Abrams
Digital Library Program Manager
Harvard University Library, Office for Information Systems
1280 Massachusetts Avenue, Suite 404
Cambridge, MA 02138
T (617) 495-3724
F (617) 495-0491
E [log in to unmask]
W http://hul.harvard.edu/~stephen/