Talk:BitstreamFormat Renovation Use Cases

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I can envision use for a flag that notifies IR administrators when a new, unknown, or "troublesome" format has been deposited. Since DSpace deposit is not always done by IR staff, material that is worrisome from a preservation perspective can creep in unnoticed.

By "troublesome" I mean "a format that in the judgment of the administrators is bad news." Cf. the dspace-tech thread a little bit ago about the video file format MXF. What would happen once the admin is notified is a good question, but I don't mind deferring it to out-of-band; the notification is the most important part. Possible? -Dorothea

OK, I see that as local policy mechanism based on the format. Why not use the existing "SupportLevel" property of the BitstreamFormat to judge if a format is "troublesome"? It currently has values Unsupported, Known, and Supported, so perhaps Unsupported could be parsed as your "troublesome" -- or another level added, ranked below Unsupported. It would signify, "not only do we not know how to preserve it, we don't really want it polluting our archive." Does it justify another level?

Then it's a matter of local policy how to react to a Bitstream with one of those undesireable formats getting ingested. I think it would be easy to implement as an Event System consumer: on a Bitstream getting added to its Item, the consumer would send a notification if the format is ranked undesireable. LarryStone